ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

GRADUATE SCHOOL

HISTORY AND CRITICAL THINKING IN ARCHITECTURE

M.A. DEGREE PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME GUIDE 2019-2020

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CONTENTS

Introduction & Overview 3

Teaching Staff 7

Programme Specifications | Aims and Learning Outcomes 24

Courses |Module Specifications | Calendar 26

Teaching and Learning Strategies 60

Assessment 61

Resources 64
 

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1. Introduction & Overview

Name of programme History and Critical Thinking in Architecture

Initiated 1994/95 Established MA Histories and Theories programme

2010/11 Programme renamed MA History and Critical Thinking in
Architecture

Present qualification MA (validated by the Open University)

Length of programme 12 months

Mode of study Full-time

Entrance requirements Diploma in architecture or

Equivalent first degree

Teaching Staff Marina Lathouri (Programme Director), Tim Benton, John

Palmesino, Georgios Tsagdis

Visiting Tutors Fabrizio Gallanti, Anthony Vidler

External Examiner Nathaniel Coleman

GS Administrative Staff Clement Chung clement@aaschool.ac.uk

The Architectural Association is approved by The Open University as an appropriate organisation to offer higher education
programmes leading to Open University Validated Awards

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Courses and activities

Assessed courses and activities (combining lectures, seminars and workshops):

 Readings of Modernity - Term 1

 Photography and Modern Architecture – Term 1
 Writing Objects and Non-Objects – Term 1
 Architecture Knowledge and Writing – Term 2
 Climate Peace – Term 2
 History as Translation: HCT & PhD Debates – Term 2
 MA Final Dissertation – Terms 3 & 4

Additional un-assessed seminars and activities:

 Two-Week Critical Writing Workshop with Visiting Tutor - Term 2

 Invited Guest Seminar on Historiography - Term 3
 Evening Lectures - Terms 1, 2 & 3
 One-Week Study Trip – Term 3

Course requirements

 Completion of a total of 180 credit units over 45 weeks of 40 hours each (1,800 hours of studies)
 Participation in the six courses and completion of writing assignments for each course. The
assignments are:
1. Three essays of 4,000 words for Readings of Modernity, Photography and Modern Architecture and
Writing Objects and Non-Objects – Term 1 – equivalent of 15 credits each (8.33% of total credits)
2. Short pieces of writing through the term for The Architecture Knowledge and Writing – Term 2 –
equivalent of 15 credits (8.33% of total credits)
3. Formulation of a Research Question for Climate Peace (max 2,000 words) – Term 2 -
equivalent of 15 credits (8.33% of total credits)
4. Interview with one of the Guest Speakers for the HCT & PhD Debates – Term 2 - equivalent
of 15 credits (8.33% of total credits)
 Participation in the Thesis Research Seminar – Term 3, which consists of weekly presentations of
work-in-process, a three-day workshop with Visiting Tutor, the unit trip, and the Final
Dissertation (12-15,000 words) to be submitted in September 2020 - equivalent of 90 credits (50%
of total credits)
 All coursework is double marked. The overall assessment of students’ work is done by an
examining board, which is composed by all members of staff and the external examiner.

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The MA History and Critical Thinking is a unique post-graduate platform for critical engagement with
contemporary arguments and practices through systematic enquiry into history, conceptual
assumptions and methodologies, and the politics of historiography.

Over the past 20 years, the 12-month programme has been continually developed and revised to
remain positioned within contemporary and emerging debates. Hence the boundaries of what might
be regarded as a legitimate object of study are being constantly interrogated and expanded. Rather
than dealing with history, architecture and the city exclusively through buildings and methodological
classifications, the course attempts to transform those into a resource through which historical and
political processes, spatial artefacts and built forms could be analysed and better understood.

Writing is essential to the course, both as practice of thinking and tool of communication. Different
modes of writing - thesis, essays, short experimental pieces, critical reviews, commentaries, book proposals
and interviews are explored to articulate the various aspects of study. Seminars with members of staff as
well as invited distinguished practitioners from different backgrounds – historians, critics, writers,
designers, artists and curators bring into the course a diversity of perspectives and skills. Architectural
writings, theoretical positions, philosophical thought, literature, drawings, photographs, film are introduced
and considered for an analysis of the connections between the textual, the visual and the graphic. The aim
is to be able to explore, adopt and adapt elements of these disciplines and practices in one’s own writing,
while preserving one’s own voice.

The programme’s ambition is three-fold: to explore writings of history and the ways in which social,
political and cultural aspirations shape particular accounts of architectural and urban modernity; to connect
current debates and projects with a wider milieu and interpret the contemporary from a historical, critical
and cross-disciplinary point of view; to investigate technologies of research, production and distribution of
knowledge in relation to practices and public cultures in architecture and in the context of recent cultural
and geo-political changes.

The organization of the course around a number of lectures, seminars, workshops, writing sessions and
open debates offers students a range of approaches to expand and interpret disciplinary knowledge within
a wider historical, cultural and political milieu. Joint seminars with other graduate as well as diploma
students, collaborations with AA Design Units, participation in juries and architectural trips and visits
enable students to engage with different perspectives, design speculation as well as particular projects.

Terms 1 and 2 centre on a core of lecture and seminar courses - Readings of Modernity (Marina
Lathouri), Photography and Modern Architecture (Tim Benton), Writing Objects and Non-Objects (Georgios
Tsagdis), Architecture Knowledge and Writing (Marina Lathouri), Climate Peace (John Palmesino), and HCT
& PhD Debates: History as Translation (Marina Lathouri with Guest Speakers) and the two-week
workshop on critical writing (Deign by Words 7: Deep Description) with Fabrizio Gallanti and Marina
Lathouri.

The Thesis is the largest and most significant component of students’ work within the overall MA
structure. The choice of topic, the organisation of research and the development of the central
argument are all organised within the Thesis Research Seminar, which takes place in Term 3. However,
the short pieces, which the students are asked to write in the context of the course Architecture
Knowledge and Writing as well as the research question, which they formulate for Climate Peace at the end
of Term 2 are to initiate the process of the final thesis research. They enable the students to shape
initial ideas and refine tools and methodologies. These writing assignments support the transition
from the taught coursework in Terms 1&2 to the individual research and work in Terms 3&4.

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An intensive reading and writing workshop with our Guest Tutor (Professor Anthony Vidler) at the
beginning of the term will support and be commensurate with the initial stages of the process toward
the formulation of the thesis topic.

At the end of Term 3 the thesis outline, main questions and material of study are presented to a jury
of invited guests. In Term 4 the students are asked to develop their thesis independently. During the
summer term, there is a second public presentation to a group of internal and external critics and
individual tutorials as necessary. During the last phase of the writing of the dissertation, students are
expected to submit a first draft. A final presentation of the completed thesis to the HCT staff and
guests as well as the new students is to provide a formal conclusion and celebration of the work of the
year and inspiring introduction to the newcomers.

In order to foster an external and collective pursuit of architectural issues visits to buildings, galleries,
museums and cities are planned through the year. The annual trip in Term 3, in particular, aims at the
exploration of specific aspects of a city or an architect’s work also in relation to the final thesis
investigations. Recent destinations have included Naples, Bologna, Ljubljana, Trieste, Marseille, La
Tourette, Porto, Como, Seville, Genoa, Basel, Helsinki and Athens.

A common concern of the different courses is the relation of theoretical debates to specific projects
and practices – visual, spatial, territorial, architectural, textual in order to develop a critical view of the
arguments put into the design and the knowledge produced through its mechanisms and effects. To
this aim, joint events with Diploma Units, participation in design reviews and public events are
regularly organised. Ventures have included joint events with Graduate design courses and regular
collaborations with Diploma and Intermediate Units which brought HCT and design students
together to discuss current debates in architecture as well as the units’ investigations. The HCT
students also act as critics in design juries and comment on evening lectures and current design
production in AA publications.

The course’s staff members come from a variety of backgrounds. They are involved in a wide range of
academic, professional and research activities at the AA and elsewhere. Their combined teaching
experience, research, publications and professional activities are a core asset of the programme,
enabling the programme to compete successfully in an international context with other world-class
programmes. It draws upon that international context to provide the MA students with visiting
lecturers and seminars that provide, both at the level of the school and the programme, a continuous
input of innovative and challenging material. Recent visiting lecturers include Jorella Andrews, Ali
Ansari, Shumon Basar, Mario Carpo, David Crowley, David Cunningham, Keller Easterling, Marco
Ferrari, Adrian Forty, David Knight, Nadir Lahiji, Leopold Lambert, Massimiliano Molona, Louis
Moreno, Siri Nergaard, Benjamin Noys, Sam Jacob, Francesco Jodice, Joan Ockman, Manuel Orazi,
Alessandra Ponte, Michelangelo Sabatino, Maria Theodorou, Anthony Vidler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein,
Ines Weizman, Sarah Whiting and Thanos Zartaloudis.

The course recruits a wide range of students. Most are trained architects. A few of our students come
from the humanities and social sciences having developed a particular interest in issues of space,
architectural and urban debates. The question of professional training underlies all of the courses
and activities. Students consider the programme as a necessary step towards doctoral research, as a
way to reorient their professional development from the practice of architecture into other fields such
as museum and gallery work, journalism, or other architecture and art-related fields, or become
involved in teaching in the field of architectural history, theory and criticism.

Finally, the HCT programme also provides research facilities and supervision with the assistance of
specialist advisers to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AA’s joint PhD
programme, a cross-disciplinary initiative supported by all the Graduate programmes.

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2. Teaching Staff

Marina Lathouri
Architect, M.Arch (Hon.), MPhil, PhD

Director MA History and Critical Thinking in Architecture

PhD Director of Studies, PhD Committee Member
Architectural Association School of Architecture

Visiting Lecturer | PhD Supervisor

Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge

Education

University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA

PhD History and Theory of Architecture (2006)
Dissertation Title: “Reconstructing the Topographies of the Modern City: the late CIAM debates”

University of Sorbonne, Department of Philosophy, Paris, France

MPhil Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics (1993)
Thesis Title: “Le Projet et la Poétique du Temps”

School of Architecture Paris-Villemin, Paris, France

MPhil History and Theory of Architecture (1992)
Thesis Title: “Le Temps, le Tracé”

The Berlage Institute, The Netherlands

Certificate of Advanced Studies in Architecture (1991)

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Greece

MArch (1989)

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Academic Positions

Architectural Association, MA History and Critical Thinking in Architecture, Director

PhD Programme, Director of Studies

University of Cambridge, Department of Architecture, Design Unit Master | History and Theory Lecturer
(1999-2002)

University of Cambridge, Department of Architecture, Visiting Lecturer | PhD Supervisor (2003 to

present)

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Visiting Lecturer (2015 to present)

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Distinguished Visiting Professor (2012- 2014)

Universidad de Navarra, Spain, Visiting Professor MA/PhD (2009 to present)

University of Thessaly, Greece, Visiting Professor MA (2012-13, 2014-16)

Open University, Athens, Adjunct Professor (2014-16)

Universidade do Minho, Portugal, Director of Studies PhD Programme (2008-10)

University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts, Adjunct Professor (1996-1999)

University of Greenwich, Masters of Arts in Architecture (MAA) and Masters of Science in

Architecture, School of Architecture and Construction, External Examiner (2006-11)

University of Kent, Masters of Arts in Architecture and Cities, School of Architecture, External
Examiner (2012 -2016)

Research Interests

Lathouri’s research interests lie in the conjunction of history and politics of historiography,
architecture and writing practices, the city and political philosophy. Most recently, she co-authored the
book Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, published several articles and directed a
Research project at the AA entitled City Cultures. In her teachings and writings, she aligns histories of
the architectural and urban project with contemporary theoretical arguments as well as textual, visual
and design practices.

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Recent Publications

Books:
Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, London: Routledge, 2008
City Cultures: Contemporary Positions on the City, London: AA Publications, 2010

Essays in Books and Articles:

“From Doxiadis’ Theory to Pikionis’ Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture”, Book
Review, in: Architectural Histories (European Architectural History Network), 2019 (forthcoming)
“Imagining the space-in-between: towards the elaboration of a method”, in: AR (Architecture
Research), University of Ljubljana, 2019 (forthcoming)
“Writing the Intimate Geographies of the City: Notes on the Plan”, in: STADIUM, Pavilion of Chile,
Biennale Architettura 2018, Catalogue, Zurich: Park Books, 2018
“The Plenitude of Word”, in: Maxwell Robert, The Time of my Life: in Architecture, London: Artifice
Books on Architecture, 2017 (with contributions from Kenneth Frampton, Adrian Forty, Edward Jones, Anthony
Vidler, among others)
“Out-of-Focus Impression: The Uncertain Typology of Louvre-Lens”, in: The Building, Lars Muller
Publishers, 2016
“Co-habitations”, in: Sym-bioseis: Architecture in the age of natural civilisations and artificial nature, Athens:
Castaniotis Press and University of Thessaly Publications, 2015
“Fragments: thinking inside the box”, in: Little Worlds, London: AA Publications, 2014
“Projective Architectures: the question of borders in a connected world”, in: Masterplanning the Adaptive
City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-first Century, London and New York: Routledge 2014, p.20
“A History of Territories, Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation”, in: System City:
Infrastructure and the space of flows, Architectural Design Special Issue 04/2013, p.32
“The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies”, in: Architectural Design, Jan/Feb 2011
“North Penn Visiting Nurses’ Association Headquarters”, in: First Works: Emerging Architectural Practices
of the 1960s and 1970s, London: AA Books, 2009
“The Frame and the Fragment: Visions for the Modern City”, in: AA Files, no 51, 2005
“Notes on Nomadism and Urban Dwelling”, in: Places of Nomadic Dwelling, Athens: Hellenic Institute
of Architecture, 2001
“vEL Architects: Urban Filter”, in: Scroope: The Cambridge Architecture Journal no 12, 2001
“Enterlacs de Topia, Interlacing Topia”, in: L’Arc Ouest pour Thessalonique: Nouveaux Espaces Collectifs
dans la Ville Contemporaine, Athens: Untimely Books, 2000
“Le Corbusier: From Paris to Chandigarh, Variations on the Same Theme (1922-56)”, in: La Citta
Nuova, Washington: ACSA Press, 2000
“CIAM Meetings 1947-59 and the Core of the City: The Transformation of an Idea”, in: La Citta
Nuova, Washington: ACSA Press, 2000

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Selection of Research Projects / Recent Lectures

“Bauhaus and Greece”, International Conference, Athens, Member of the Scientific Committee, May 2019

“Writing the architectural object: notes on type, the typical and typology”, Lecture at the Austrian Society for
Architecture, Vienna, May 2018

“The History of the Concept of Type”, Paper presented at: “Think. Design. Build.” International Conference,
Technical University of Berlin, Key note Speaker, November 2018

“The Sketch: Lines of Inquiry”, Exhibition, Workshops, Seminars, Architectural Association Gallery,
Curator, November/October 2018

“Words and Voices”, History and Critical Thinking Symposium, Architectural Association, Co-organiser
with Caroline Rabourdin /Speaker, May 2018
With the participation of Yve Lomax (visual artist, writer), Shumon Basar (writer, cultural critic), Smadar Dreyfus (visual
artist), Helene Frichot (Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory in Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm) and Lucie Mercier (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University)

“Waiting for appropriation: Notes toward a history of the architectural project”, Paper presented at: “Tabula Rasa”,
International Conference, Universidad de Navarra, Key note Speaker, February 2015

“The object under translation”, Paper presented at: “Architecture in Translation: The Mediation of Social and
Urban Spaces”, International Conference, Venice Biennale, Speaker, September 2014

“Translations in Architecture: From open plan to open system”, Paper presented at: Resonances of Modernity,
International Conference on the occasion of the hundred years of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino,
Architectural Association, Speaker, 2014

“Homo Ludens: experiential narratives of the post-war city”, Paper presented at: Memory narrates the
city: oral testimonies for the past and the present of urban space, 20th International Conference of the Society of
Oral History, University of Athens 2014

Design by Words, Research and Post-Graduate Workshop on Writing in collaboration with Fabrizio
Gallanti (Canadian Centre of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada), Architectural
Association 2014
Architecture Politics, MA History and Critical Thinking Debates, Architectural Association,
Organiser/Moderator, 2013-2017
Politics and Spaces, MA History and Critical Thinking Debates, Architectural Association,
Organiser/Moderator, 2009-13
City Cultures Research Cluster AA/CC, Architectural Association, Director, 2008-11
Writing Architecture, Post-Graduate Seminar, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 2012-2014
Critical Writing in Architecture, International Conference, Architectural Association,
Organiser/Speaker/Moderator, 2011
History and Theory in Architectural Education, International Workshop at Werner Oechslin Library
Foundation, Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Speaker, 2009
Re-reading Palladio, International Conference, Architectural Association in collaboration with the Royal
Academy of Arts, Organiser/Moderator, 2009
Writing in Architecture, International Course at Werner Oechslin Library Foundation, Speaker, 2008

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“Reconstructing the topographies of the modern city: the late CIAM debates”, PhD Dissertation presented at the
University of Pennsylvania, 2005
“Aris Konstantinidis: The Building and the Land”, Exhibition of drawings, photographs and models by Aris
Konstantinidis, at Princeton University and The Foundation for Hellenic Culture in New York,
Curator, 1998
“Aris Konstantinidis: The Building and the Land”, International Conference, Princeton University, School
of Architecture, Organiser/Speaker/Moderator, 1998

Design Research

Lead Consultant, Urban and Planning Department of the City of Geneva, Switzerland, 2000-03
Project Architect of Exhibition Space / Curator, H. P. Berlage’s Stock Exchange, Amsterdam
Architectural Studies for Sustainable Houses, San Francisco
Research Project for New Housing Systems, The Netherlands
“Sign of the Future”, International Ideas Competition, Graz, Austria
6th International Design Competition, Osaka, Japan
C.A.U.E. 94, “Hotel Industriel”, Paris, France
Planning and Design of Housing District and Cultural Centre, Montauban, France
Design Consultant, Architecture Studio Architects, Paris

Design Awards

1st Prize, International Competition, Master Planning and Infrastructure Research for the urban
district Gare des Eaux Vives in Geneva and its rail connection to France (1999)
Design Honour, Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam (1999)
Winning Entry, International Competition of Urban Design, the Northern districts of the city of
Thessaloniki, Greece (1997)
Distinguished Project, Biennale of Venice (1991)
2nd Prize, International Competition of Urban Design, Master Plan and Design of Olympic Village,
Russia (1991)

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Lectures
Lathouri has lectured at the AA and the University of Cambridge at all levels, undergraduate and
graduate as well as widely in Europe, U.S.A. and Latin America.

Academic affiliations to the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Cambridge University,

The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Staatliche
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Stuttgart, Universidad de Navarra, Werner Oechslin Library
Foundation, University of Greenwich, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Virginia
Tech, University of Thessaly Greece, Greek Open University and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de
Chile.

Current PhD Supervisions

6 PhD students at the Architectural Association School of Architecture
2 PhD students at the University of Cambridge (Department of Architecture and Faculty of Asian and
Middle Eastern Studies)

Lathouri has previously supervised to successful completion and examined numerous PhD students at
the AA, The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, Goldsmiths University of London, Universidad de
Navarra in Pamplona Spain, Universidade do Minho Portugal and University of Thessaly in Volos.

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Tim Benton

Tim Benton is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Open University. His research achieved
international renown in the history of architecture and design between the wars. His work on Le
Corbusier is very widely cited; his book on the Villas of Le Corbusier (first edition in French, 1984)
has gone through several editions and now exists in French, English and Italian editions. In a series of
important articles Benton extended the research of this classic text. His book The Rhetoric of Modernism
Le Corbusier as lecturer (2007) was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix du Livre sur l’Architecture by the
Academie de l’Architecture, Paris and is currently available in French and English editions. The book Lc
Foto: Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer was published by Lars Mueller Publications in July 2013. More
recently, he has been working with the Association Cap Moderne on the restoration of the villa E-
1027, Le Corbusier's cabanon and the Étoile de mer and Unités de camping at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin,
publishing a book Le Corbusier peintre à Cap Martin (Paris 2015), which was awarded the Prix du Livre de
la Méditérrannée. He has further edited a new edition of the English language publication of Le
Corbusier’s Precisions (1930), Schediegger & Spiess, 2015.

Benton also worked on a number of exhibitions and their catalogues, including Art Deco 1910-1939
and Modernism designing a new World at the V&A and the exhibition on the Italian architect Luigi
Moretti at the MAXXI gallery in Rome (opened 27 May 2010). He also curated an exhibition on Art
Deco at the Fundacion March, Madrid (2015). He curated one of the rooms of an exhibition on Le
Corbusier and Photography at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds (2012), subsequently on
show at the CIVA gallery Brussels. His international reputation is confirmed by an entry on his work
in the volume 6 of the Dizionario dell’architettura del XX secolo, Turin 1995 and by invitations in the
United States, including a semester as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at the Clark Art
Institute at Williams College (2009), Columbia University (2007), the Bard Graduate College (2003 and
2006) and at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (2010-2013).

Selected recent works:

Benton, Tim. 2015. Le Corbusier Peintre a Cap Martin. Paris: Editions du Patrimoine. 120 pp.

Benton, Tim, Manuel Fontan del Junco, and Maria Zozaya, eds. 2015. Modern Taste; Art Deo in Paris
1910-1935. Edited by Fundacion Juan March. Madrid: Fundacion Juan March.

Benton, T. (2014) 'Le Corbusier et la Méditerranée' in: J. L. Bonillo, Domus Mare Nostrum. Toulon,
Hemisud for Conseil General du Var: pp. 23-33, 978-2-913959-55-2

Benton, T. (2012) 'Le Corbusier's secret photographs' in: N. Herschdorfer and L. Umstätter, Le
Corbusier and the Power of Photography. London, Thames & Hudson: 30-55

Benton, T. (2010) 'Art Deco in the Anglo-Saxon World' in: J. C. Dias, Art Deco 1925. Lisbon,
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation: 113-128

Benton, T. (2011) 'The Villa de Mandrot and the place of the imagination' in: M. Richard, Massilia.
Marseilles, Editions Imbernon: 92-105

Benton, T. (2010) 'Le Corbusier e il vernacolare: Le Sextant a Les Mathes 1935' in: A. Canziani, Le
Case per artisti sull'Isola Comacina. Como, NodoLibri: 22-43

Benton, T. (2010) 'Il concorso per il palazzo del Littorio' in: B. Reichlin and L. Tedeschi, Luigi
Moretti, Razionalismo e trasgressivita tra Barocco e informale. Milan, Electa: 101-120

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Benton, T. (2009) The rhetoric of modernism : Le Corbusier as a lecturer, Boston, MA, Birkhaeuser (and the
French edition: Benton, T. (2007) Le Corbusier conférencier, Paris, Le Moniteur, which was awarded
the Prix du Livre by the Académie de l’Architecture, Paris, 2008)

Benton, T. (2007) The villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920-1930, Basel ; Boston, Birkhäuser
(new and enarged edition, also in French)

Benton, T. (2006) 'Representing Modernity' in: The Imagined Interior (ed. J. Aynsley) London, V&A
Publications

Benton, T. (2005) 'Charlotte Perriand: Les années Le Corbusier' in: Charlotte Perriand. Paris, Editions
du Centre Pompidou: 11-24

Benton, T. (2005) ‘Building Utopia’, 'Modernism and Nature' and 40,000 words of catalogue entries in:
Modernism Designing for a new world. (ed. C. Wilk) London, V&A Publications

Benton, T. (2004) 'Pessac and Lège revisited: standards, dimensions and failures' Massilia 3: 64-99

Benton, T., P. Carl, et al. (2003) Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention. London, AA Publications

Benton, C., T. Benton, et al. (2003) Art deco, 1910-1939. London, V&A Publications (now in fourth
reprint)

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John Palmesino

Italian architect and urbanist, born in Switzerland in 1970

He has established Territorial Agency in 2007 together with Ann-Sofi Rönnskog.
He is Diploma Unit Master at the AA Architectural Association, London.
He is Director of AA Territories Think Tank
He is Research Fellow at the Research Architecture Centre, Goldsmiths University of London.

Territorial Agency is an independent organisation that innovatively promotes and works for
sustainable territorial transformations. It works to strengthen the capacity of local and international
communities in comprehensive spatial transformation management. Territorial Agency’s projects
channel available spatial resources towards the development of their full potential. Territorial Agency’s
work builds on wide stake-holder networks. It combines analysis, projects, advocacy and action.

Research Projects

With Territorial Agency, photographer and film-maker Armin Linke and curator Anselm Franke, he is
the author of Anthropocene Observatory, a multi-year research and film project investigating the
unfolding across international institutions of the consequences of the thesis of a new man-made
geological epoch. The project is commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Territorial Agency is involved in large-scale spatial transformation projects, among which the
integrated plan for the Makermeer, commissioned by Rijkswaaterstaat in the Netherlands, and the plan
for the relocation of the city of Kiruna, in Northern Sweden.

Initiator of the multidisciplinary research project ‘Neutrality’: the research investigates the relations
between architecture, the processes of construction of the inhabited space and the forms of polity in
the 21st Century. The project analyses the modalities of operation of the clusters of introverted and
almost self-referential institutional, economical, political, military, cultural innovation spaces and
enclosed knowledge circuits that appear to be the critical hallmarks of today’s city and cultural climate.
He is conducting his researches on neutrality as a device of transformation and control of the
contemporary inhabited space for his PhD at the Research Architecture Centre, Goldsmiths,
University of London.

He is director of the AA Territories Think Tank. Recent research organised includes the Graham
Foundation award winning project Plan the Planet, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and the Formation of
International and Global Architecture. He is the recipient of a 2009 Graham Foundation Grant award
for his researches on the ‘Architecture of UN peace-keeping missions’.

He has been in charge of the Master course at the Research Architecture Centre, where he is leading a
research on the spatial transformations related to the operations of International organisations,
Intergovernmental Organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).
He has taught together with Prof. Irit Rogoff a MA course on Geographies at the Visual Cultures
departments, Goldsmiths, University of London.

He has been Research Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht between 2010 and 2013.

He has been Head of research at ETH Zurich, Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute, between
2003 and 2007. ETH Studio Basel is a research institute for the investigation of the transformation
patterns of the city of the 21st Century, established by the Pritzker Prize winner architects and

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professors Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. He has managed the transition of ETH Studio
Basel into a full Research Institute of the ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, establishing the
research agenda and methodology. He has led the Institute researches on a series of international
cities, also in conjunction with Harvard School of Design, where he helped establish the Independent
Thesis Programme led by Herzog and de Meuron, working on collaborative projects with ETH Studio
Basel. He has managed the works for the publication of the research ‘Switzerland–An Urban Portrait’.
He has curated the participation of the Institute at the 10th Architecture Biennale in Venice, 2006.

He has co-founded Multiplicity with Stefano Boeri in 1996. Multiplicity is a multidisciplinary network
of architects, urbanists, social scientists, photographers, filmmakers and visual artists that explores
contemporary territorial transformations. The Milan – based organisation deals with contemporary
urbanism, representation of inhabited landscape transformation, visual arts and general culture. Main
projects include USE Uncertain states of Europe (Mutations, Triennale di Milano), SOLID SEA
(documenta11), Border Devices (Biennale di Venezia), The Road Map (KW Berlin).

He is author of several territorial research studies, with particular attention to the transformations in
the general European context and the Swiss urban structure in particular. His research focuses on the
representation of self-organisation processes in the construction of the contemporary urban condition.

Member of the Advisory Board of Barcelona Regional.

Member of the International Advisory Board for the Sustainable Development of Mexico City
Member of METROBASEL, Platform for the development of the Basel metropolitan region
Advisory Board of AISS Arts in Social Structures, an international NGO funded and run by artists.

Lectures / Academic Affiliations / Publications

Palmesino has lectured widely in Europe, Asia, in Japan, Australia and in the US.
Academic affiliations to the AA Architectural Association School of Architecture, Goldsmiths,
University of London, ETH Zurich, EPFL Lausanne, Royal Academy of Arts Copenhagen,
Politecnico di Milano, IUAV Venezia, University of Genova, and at the Harvard School of Design.

He is co-author of ‘USE- Uncertain states of Europe’, Milano 2003; ‘MUTATIONS’, Barcelona 2000;
‘Lessico Postfordista-Scenari della mutazione’, Milano 2001. He has published several essays and
articles in the major architecture and urban magazines (Domus, Abitare, Archis, Volume,
StadtBauWelt, etc’).

16
Georgios Tsagdis
BA, BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

AoS: Ancient Philosophy, 20th-21st Century European Philosophy

AoC: History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Art

Academic Teaching & Research Positions

Fellow, Westminster Law & Theory Lab (2014- )

https://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminster-law-and-theory-lab/lab-members/lab-fellows
Lecturer, Architectural Association (AA), London (2018- )
Lecturer, Leiden University, The Netherlands (2019- )
Lecturer, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2019- )
Visiting Lecturer, University of Greenwich, Faculty of Archit., Comp. & Humanities (2017- )
Guest Lecturer, London School of Philosophy (2016-18)
Graduate Tutor, University of Surrey, Department of Sociology (2015-2017)

Other Academic Roles

Fellow, Higher Education Academy (HEA) (2017- )

Member of Board, International Society for Philosophers (ISFP) (2014- )
http://www.isfp.co.uk/international_society_4.html

Studies
PhD in Philosophy under the supervision of Prof. Howard Caygill
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University (committee:
2008-2013
Profs. Miguel de Beistegui, Warwick Uni. & Catherine Malabou, CRMEP, Kingston)
Thesis title: Nihil ex Nihilo. The Archeology of Nothing: Heidegger & the Inception of Logos

MA in Cultural History
2007-2008 Goldsmiths College, University of London
Dissertation title: The αυτό and the άλλο: Heidegger and the Way
BA (Hons) in Politics (Major) & Economics (Minor)
2003-2007 University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki
Dissertation title: Eye and Nothing. A liminal study of Theodor Adorno (In Greek)
BA (Hons) in Philosophy
2003-2007
Birkbeck College, University of London
English (near-native): Cambridge University, Proficiency Certificate (C2) (2000)
German (fluent): Goethe Institute, Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom (C1) (2006)
Languages: Greek (mother tongue), Ancient Greek (fluent for research and teaching)
Latin (competent for research)

17
Prizes, Scholarships

(2009) Erasmus scholarship, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin

(2007-8) Prize for MA Dissertation of the Year, Goldsmiths College, London
(2005) Erasmus scholarship, Philipps-Universität, Marburg
(2003-7) Four consecutive awards of excellence, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki

Publications

Books:

1. ‘The Archaeology of Nothing, Heidegger and the Inception of Logos’, revised for
publication with Edinburgh UP; informal commitment by the publisher with publication projected in
2019.

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

6. ‘Share of Death: Care Crosses the Camp’, revised for submission at Theory & Event
5. ‘Tears of Potentiality, Love of Liquid Rupture’, under review by Paragraph
4. ‘Dispositions: The Technophysical Apparatus’, Azimuth, 10 (2017), 13-25
3. ‘Suspending the Academic Space’, Continental Thought & Theory, 1:1 (2016), 49-57
2. ‘From the Soul: Theriopolitics in the Republic’, Philosophy Today, 60:1 (2016), 7-24
1. ‘Plato’s Errancy, The Voices of Truth’, Parallax, 21:2 (2015), 183-195

Book Chapters:

5. ‘The Aural: Heidegger and Fundamental Oto-Cheiro-logy II,’ in The Ghost of Transparency: An
Architectonics of Communication, eds. S. Savić, M. Doyle, V. Bühlmann (Birkhauser, 2018, forth.)
4. ‘The Manual: Heidegger and Fundamental Oto-Cheiro-logy I,’ in Essays Situating Heidegger in
Contemporary Media Studies, eds. Justin Michael Battin, German Duarte (Peter Lang, 2018, forth.)
3. ‘Love and the Apparatus: on a Hegelian Fragment’, in Can Philosophy Love? Reflections and Encounters,
eds. Todd McGowanforth, Cindy Zeiher (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 119-132.
2. ‘Thoughts on a Parasite and Martyr’, in Urban Fauna Lab: The Valley of Beggars, eds. Vladislav
Shapovalov, Katerina Chucalina (Venice; Marsilio Editori, 2015), 108-121.
1. ‘From the Works to the Problem of Love: The Aporia of the Neighbour in Kierkegaard’, in
Thoughts of Love, ed. Gary Peters (Cambridge; CSP, 2013), 88-106.

Other Essays:

4. ‘Preliminary Notes’, (co-auth. Susanna Lindberg), Azimuth, 10 (2017), 9-11

3. ‘Seismic Tabulations’, Quantum Words, 1: The Table (2017), online
2. ‘Word of Resistance, Energeia with Howard Caygill’, Frear, 9 (2014), 608-613 (In Greek)
1. ‘Songs from the Second Floor’, Rattle, 4 (2013), 50-66

Book Reviews:

5. ‘Francesco Vitale, The Last Fortress of Metaphysics: Jacques Derrida & the Deconstruction of Architecture’,
Phenomenological Reviews (2018, forth.), online.

18
4. ‘Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory, Biopower & Vegetable Life’, Pulse, 4 (2016), 92-97
3. ‘Jeremy Bell & Michael Naas (eds.), Plato’s Animals’, Phenomenological Reviews 2:35 (2016), online
2. ‘Nany Bauer, How To Do Things with Pornography’, Metapsychology, 19:52 (2015), online
1. ‘Marsilio Ficino, On Dionysius the Areopagite’, The Historical Review, 12 (2015), 260-263

Editorials:

2. ‘Intersections, At the Technophysics of Space’ (special issue, co-edit. Susanna Lindberg), Azimuth:
Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age, 10, 2017
1. ‘Issue 4’ (with A. Covaci, F. G. Karioris, A. C. Manta, M. Temmes & E. Zekany), Pulse: A History,
Sociology and Philosophy of Science Journal, 4, 2016

Selected Talks (Conferences, Workshops, Seminars)

30. (2019**) Of Times: Resigned, Arrested, Imagined, University of Leiden.

29. (2018*) On Hyperobjects: Digital Mirrors and the Reality Principle, TU, Vienna.
28. (2018**) Reading the Politics of Friendship, Workshop, Kings College, London.
27. (2018*) Thanatopolitics: Total Power contra Care, CRIPT, University of Kent.
26. (2018*) Supplanting the Critic: Dada contra the Beautiful, Visiting Seminar, UVA, Amsterdam.
25. (2018*) The Origin of the Work of Art: Responses to Heidegger, CPVA, KCL, London.
24. (2018**) Learning and Community, Pedagogy: Making a Difference, Westminster, London.
23. (2018*) Forays in Spacing: Nature, Technics, Trace, Graduate Seminar, AA, London.
22. (2017*) i. Philosophy & Science; ii. Philosophy & History, British Council, London.
21. (2017*) In Proclum: Intelligible Motion in the Parmenides Commentary, Kinesis, FU, Berlin.
20. (2017*) On Brexit: Sovereignty, Identity & the Future of Hospitality, GLA, Brighton.
19. (2017*) On Apeiron: Heidegger and Anaximander, Classics Research Seminar, Bristol.
18. (2017*) On Nature: Heidegger and Heraclitus, SEP-FEP, Winchester.
17. (2017) Radical Love, Giving Life to Politics; with Cavarero, Butler, Honnig, CAPPE, Brighton.
16. (2017*) Derrida, Deconstruction, Différance, School of Economic Science, London.
15. (2016*) Philosophies of Nature: Schelling & his Contemporaries, workshop, UWE, Bristol.
14. (2016) Discussing with the Law: Plato & Blanchot, SEP/FEP, Regent’s, London.
13. (2016**) Chora, Chaos & the New Absolute, 5th Derrida Today, Goldsmiths, London.
12. (2015*) Fossil and Trace: the Time of Nature, Beyond Ecology, EUSP, St. Petersburg.
11. (2015) Excess: the nurture of the mouth II, 10th CCPC Annual Meeting, Reykjavik.
10. (2015) Levinas and the Animal, Philosophy Forum, Stuart Low Trust, London.
9. (2015) The Invention of Hierarchy in Pseudo-Dionysius, BSHP Annual Conference, York.
8. (2015) Mitsein in the Death-Camp, Todorov Colloquium, Sheffield.
7. (2015) Excess: the nurture of the mouth, Being-Intimate-Political: On (with) J.-L. Nancy, Athens.
6. (2014) Taming the Therion: Plato to Agamben, Humanity and Animality, UCL, London.
5. (2014) Revolutionary Parasitology: The (st)age of the plague, SEP/FEP, Utrecht.
4. (2014*) Power and Preying in the Republic, King’s College, London.
3. (2014*) Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology, Royal Holloway, London.
2. (2013) The Beast’s Two Bodies, Being Beyond Boundaries, Kingston University, London.
1. (2011) The Heterology of Madness: Foucault & the dazzling mirror, SEP/FEP, St John’s, York.

(*: invited, **: convened)

Teaching, Tutoring

Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning, Higher Eductation Academy Fellow.

Module I: Introduction to Teaching and Learning in the HE, Assessment and Feedback, Active Learning in the
Classroom & Teaching Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classes.

19
Module II: Micro-teaching, research on alienation in HE, self-reflection.
Module III: Research and practice on interdisciplinary curriculum design, research reflection.
Module IV: Research on interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.
9. (2018-) Lecturer; Architectural Association (AA), London.
MA module leader. Support in the coordination of the MA and PhD Research Seminars.
i. Writing Objects and Non-Objects (20th-21st c. responses to the Cartesian object: Heidegger to Latour).
8. (2017) Tutor; Ancient Philosophy Summer School, UCL.
Organisation and teaching (advanced level) for the first year of the summer school.
i. On Platonic Love (Plato & Plotinus).
ii. On Space, Void & Time (Aristotle & Lucretius).
7. (2017- ) Visiting Lecturer; Literature, Language & Theatre Dept., University of Greenwich.
Course planning, lecture and seminar teaching assessing for the International Foundation.
i. Ethics & Society (2016- ).
ii. Study Skills (2017- ).
iii. Academic Writing (2017- ).
6. (2016-18) Tutor; London School of Philosophy.
Syllabus design, teaching at graduate/research level.
i. Derrida & Deconstruction (2016-17).
ii. Agamben: Language, Death, History (2017-18).
5. (2016- ) Instructor; IES Abroad, Summer School.
Syllabus, design, teaching and assessing US college students on the IES exchange program.
i. Gender and Sexuality in Dutch Literature from 1700 to the Present.
4. (2015-2017) Graduate Tutor; Department of Sociology, University of Surrey.
Seminar teaching, assessing coursework for first and second year undergraduate students.
i. Introduction to Classical Sociological Thinkers (2015-17).
ii. Theorizing the Contemporary World (2015-16).
iii. Introduction to Criminal Justice Systems (2015-16).
3. (2014- ) Guest Lecturer; Law School, University of Westminster.
Oui!Learn Affiliate: contributing to curriculum development for Westminster’s Centre for Teaching
Innovation.
i. Law and the Environment (LLB) (2014-18), annual lectures on Animality, Posthumanism and Politics.
ii. The Grammatology Sessions (2017-18); module convener—open course.
iii. Heidegger after Derrida: Being between Time and History (2017-18); module convener—open course.
2. (2014- ) Member of the Board of ISFP.
Assessing essays nominated for the Society’s Associate and Fellowship Awards.
1. (2010- ) Private Tutor.
Philosophy, Politics & Sociology, for A-levels, as well as at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Research & Study Groups (Organized and led).

(2016- ) Seminar of Neoplatonic Studies, Warburg Institute, London

(2013-2016) On The Enneads of Plotinus, UCL & Warburg Institute, London
Creator, editor and contributor to the Plotinus Archive, an online polyphonic commentary on the
Enneads (https://plotinusarchive.wordpress.com/)
(2012) On The Pre-Socratics, CRMEP, Kingston, London.

20
(2011-12) On Plato’s Republic & Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, CRMEP, Kingston London
(2009-10) On Heidegger’s Being & Time, Goldsmiths College, London

Conferences, Workshops, Panels (Organization)

(2019) Conference: Of Times: Resigned, Arrested, Imagined; Temporality in Hegel, Heidegger,

Derrida, is planned at the moment with Dr. Bart Zantvoort and Dr. Rozemund Uljée, to take place
in the coming spring at the University of Leiden.
(2018) Workshop: On the Politics of Friendship. With Cillian Ó Fathaigh and Luke Collison, King’s
College, London.
(2016) Panel: Derrida and Meillassoux or the Absolute, co-organized with Dr. Jean-Paul Martinon, for the
5th Derrida Today Conference, Goldsmiths, London.

Member of the Editorial Board

(2016- ) Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom

(2015- ) Pulse: A History, Sociology & Philosophy of Science Journal
(2017-18) Evental Aesthetics: An Independent Journal of Philosophy

Journal Referee

Evental Aesthetics: An Independent Journal of Philosophy (2017-18) | British Journal for the
History of Philosophy (2017- ) | Culture and Dialogue (2016- ) | Journal of Aesthetics and
Phenomenology (2016- ) | Studies in Social and Political Thought (SSPT) (2016- ) | Continental
Thought & Theory, A Journal of Intellectual Freedom (2016- ) | Azimuth: Philosophical
Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age (2016- ) | Badiou Studies (2016- ) | Stasis (2016- )
Pulse: A History, Sociology & Philosophy of Science Journal (2015- )

Memberships in Scholarly Societies

Society for European Philosophy (SEP) (executive committee) (2017- )| British Society for the
History of Philosophy (BSHP) (2015- ) | Royal Institute of Philosophy (2015- ) | Communauté des
Chercheurs sur la Communauté (CCC) (2015- ) | European Consortium for Political Research
(ECPR) (2015- ) | International Society for Philosophers (ISFP) (2015- )| Society for the Promotion
of Hellenic Studies (SPHS) (2014- ) | Nordic Society for Phenomenology (2014- )

21
Visiting Tutors

Fabrizio Gallanti

Fabrizio Gallanti has wide-ranging and international experience in architectural design, education,
publication, and exhibitions. He was the Associate Director Programs at the Canadian Centre of
Architecture in Montreal and the first recipient of the Mellon Senior Fellow at Princeton University
School of Architecture (2014-15) and the Graham Foundation (2015) for the research project Las
Ciudades del Boom: Economic growth, urban life and architecture in the Latin American city, 1989 – 2014.

He holds a Ph.D. in architectural design from the Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy 2001) and an M.
Arch. from the University of Genova (1995). Between 2002 and 2006 he lived in Santiago, Chile,
practicing as architect and teaching Architectural Design and Architectural Theory at the Universidad
Diego Portales (2002-2006), Pontificia Universidad Católica (2002-2006) and at the Universidad
Nacional Andrés Bello (2004-2006). Between 2006 and 2007 he was the academic director for the
international courses at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), Milano, Italy. Between 2008 and
2011 he taught Architecture Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà di Architettura Ambientale.

He curated several cycles of lectures and international seminars, referred to architecture and urbanism:
multiplicity. Una collezione di luoghi, Triennale di Milano, Italy, (2000-2001), Urbania, Bologna, Italy (2009),
ArchiLiFE, Le LiFE, Saint Nazaire, France (2010), Learning from…, Canadian Centre for Architecture
(2011/2013). He curated several exhibitions, among others: Next to city, Akademie Schloss Solitude,
Stuttgart, Germany (1997), Su_RUT?, Galeria Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile (2004), Searching for
an Ideal Urbanity, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany (2007), Alturas de Macchu Picchu.
Martin Chambi – Álvaro Siza at work and ABC:MTL. A self-portrait of Montreal both at the Canadian
centre for Architecture, Montreal (2012).

He frequently writes for international architecture magazines and journals such as 32, A+U, Abitare,
Domus, Museion Journal, CLOG, San Rocco, Journal of Architectural Education and Il Giornale
dellʼArchitettura. In 2006 he was the guest editor of the special issue of the Japanese architecture
magazine A+U Chile Deep South, dedicated to contemporary Chilean architecture. In 2010 he was the
guest editor of the academic journal Materia #01 published by the Universidad San Sebastian with a
special issue dedicated to architectural education. Between 2007 and 2011 he was architecture editor at
Abitare magazine and chief editor of the Abitare web-site. Between 1993 and 2004 he was a founding
member of gruppo A12, collective of architects dedicated to the hybridization between architectural
design and visual arts, based in Genoa and Milan (www.gruppoa12.org). During its trajectory gruppo
A12 has produced a consistent body of work and research that encompassed a multiple array of
practices: architecture design (25 apartments housing complex in Borghetto Lodigiano, Italy 1996-
1999; Europan 5, first prize), spatial installation and exhibition designs (ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; manifesta 3, Lubljiana; P.S.1, New York; Musée dʼArt Moderne de la
Ville de Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo; Villa Medici, Rome; Center
for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu). In 2000 gruppo A12 participated to the Venice Architecture
Biennale with the research project “parole”, a dynamic dictionary of the contemporary city
(http://parole.aporee.org). Since 2003 he has developed a professional partnership with Francisca
Insulza. Their work has been exhibited in various venues (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago
de Chile; exo, Sao Paulo; film + arch, Graz; Architecture and Urbanism Biennale Shenzhen Hong
Kong, Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal).

22
Anthony Vider

Anthony Vidler, historian and critic, is Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at
Yale University and the former Dean of the Cooper Union School of Architecture.

Vidler received his professional degree in architecture from Cambridge University in England, and his
doctorate in History and Theory from the University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. He was
a member of the Princeton University School of Architecture faculty from 1965–93, serving as the
William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture, the Chair of the Ph.D. Committee, and Director of the
Program in European Cultural Studies. In 1993 he took up a position as professor and Chair of the
Department of Art History at UCLA, with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture from
1997. He was appointed Acting Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper
Union in 2001, and Dean of the School in 2002.

As designer and curator he installed the permanent exhibition of the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
in the Royal Salt Works of Arc-et-Senans in Franche-Comté, France, as well as curating the exhibition,
“Ledoux et les Lumières” at Arc-et-Senans for the European year of Enlightenment. In 2004 he was
asked to curate the portion of the exhibition “Out of the Box” dedicated to James Stirling, for the
Canadian Center of Architecture, Montreal, and in 2010 installed the exhibition “Notes from the
Archive: James Frazer Stirling,” in the Yale Centre for British Art, an exhibition that then travelled to
the Tate Britain and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart in 2011.

He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities; he was a Getty Scholar, at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in
1992–93 and a Senior Mellon Fellow at the Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal, in 2005.
His publications include The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton
Architectural Press, 1987), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien
Regime (MIT Press, 1990) which received the Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award from the Society of
Architectural Historians, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (MIT Press,
1992), Warped Space: Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000), Histories of the Immediate
Present: The Invention of Architectural Modernism (MIT Press, 2008), James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the
Archive (Yale University Press, 2010), and The Scenes of the Street and other Essays (Monacelli Press, 2011).
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the architecture award
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011.

23
3. Programme Specifications: Aims and Learning Outcomes

There are two primary objectives of the History and Critical Thinking Course in the Architecture
programme. The first is to contribute to a deep understanding, both in theoretical and historical terms,
of contemporary spatial and visual cultures. The second objective is to enable students to explore and
engage with technologies of production and distribution of knowledge, techniques of enquiry and
modes of writing. The academic year is organised around seminars, lectures, intensive workshops,
debates, trips, events and writing assignments. The programme aims to provide students with skills
that are architecturally interpretative, historically and politically situated, and culturally relational.
 
Aligned to the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ) and QAA Subject
Benchmark (Architecture), on successful completion of the MA in History & Critical Thinking
students will be able to:

A/ Knowledge and Understanding

A1 demonstrate a systematic understanding of knowledge of modern and contemporary

architecture in its built form, but also its projects, histories and theoretical positions
A2 demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the histories and discourses on modernism,
modernity and the contemporary; how these discourses have been constructed and variously
interpreted
A3 demonstrate a critical awareness of current problems and new insights in the field as well as
of other intellectual discourses and cultural arenas that have had a major impact upon
architectural theories and practices
A4 demonstrate critical capacity to interpret knowledge and evaluate current research to analyse
and describe buildings, systems of architectural representation and cities
A5 read and analyse texts in order to assess their relation to architecture, design and the city
A6 relate cultural objectives to forms of architectural practice and design speculation, to connect
built – architectural and urban - form with a wider cultural and political context

B/ Subject Specific Skills and Attributes

B1 evaluate critically advanced scholarship, complex arguments and theories as well as their
relation to design practices
B2 develop a critique of theories and practices and present the interpretations and conclusions in
an informative and well-organized oral presentation
B3 undertake independent research with minimum guidance
B4 write a well-structured essay that shows evidence of independent research, makes an
argument clearly and effectively, presents original ideas and conclusions, and uses standard
style for referencing

C/ Transferable Skills and Attributes

On successful completion of the MA in History & Critical Thinking students should be able to:

C1 use their analytical and critical skills to interpret and create new knowledge, of a quality to
extend the forefront of the field
C2 undertake advanced research activities and engage in their dissemination through doctoral
studies, writing, teaching, curating, editing and publishing

24
The following table - Curriculum Map indicates which study units are responsible for
delivering (shaded) and assessing (X) particular learning outcomes

A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 B1 B2 B3 B4 C1 C2

Photography and
Modern
Architecture X X X X X X
Term 1

Readings of
Modernity
Term 1 X X X X X X X X

Writing Objects X X X X X X
and Non-Objects
Term 1

Architecture
Knowledge and
Writing/Critical X X X X X X X X X
writing workshop
Term 2

HCT/PhD
Debates: History
as Translation X X X X X X X X X X
Term 2

Climate Peace
Term 2
X X X X X X

Thesis Research
Seminar/Final
Dissertation – X X X X X X X X X X X X
Terms 3&4

25
4. Course/Module Specifications

The programme combines lectures, seminars, workshops, open debates and field trips. The core of the
M.A. consists of the six lecture and seminar courses – Readings of Modernity, Photography and Modern
Architecture, Writing Objects and Non-Objects, Architecture Knowledge and Writing, Climate Peace, History as
Translation (HCT/PhD Debates) - which are specifically designed to provide the students with a deep
understanding of the overall field of the programme.

The two-week seminar series Design by words 7: Deep Description on critical writing with Fabrizio Gallanti
and Marina Lathouri in Term 2 concludes the course Architecture Knowledge and Writing.

The three-day intensive seminar on Reading and Writing with Professor Anthony Vidler in May is in
conjunction with the Thesis Research Seminar in Term 3.

The above seminars and additional activities, which are recurring and compulsory, are essential to the
knowledge of the course and contribute to the learning outcomes of the students.

Students may also audit courses in the other programmes of the Graduate School or the Diploma
School History and Theory Studies with the director’s agreement and if the selected course is to assist
the student’s study of a particular topic and contribute to the student’s field of interest.

Students’ work is supervised through a combination of intensive writing seminars with presentations
in class, regular individual tutorials as well as the thesis seminar. All function to develop the students’
analytical skills and expression and to assist them with the identification of their research topics for
assessed work in the form of a paper.

The thesis is the largest and most significant component of students’ work within the overall MA
structure. The choice of topic, the organisation of research and the development of the central
argument are all organised within the Thesis Research Seminar, which takes place in Term 3. The weekly
Seminar is run by the director of the programme, who ensures the continuity of the work and invites
other members of staff and/or external critics to provide feedback to the students’ weekly
presentation of work in progress. The group discussions may be supplemented by individual tutorials,
but central to the development of the thesis is the collective seminar. From the point of view of the
individual student, this has the advantage that they receive not only the comments and suggestions of
an individual tutor, but those of the student’s peers in a collective setting. From the point of view of
the other students, the seminar provides a means not only of developing their own thesis, but also of
experiencing the development, difficulties, and solutions of all the other students. In this way, students
are provided with an invaluable tool in learning about the nature of a dissertation from the shared
experiences of the group.

At the end of Term 3 the thesis outline, main questions and material of study are presented to a jury
of invited guests. In Term 4 the students are asked to develop their thesis independently. During the
summer term, there is a second public presentation to a group of internal and external critics and
individual tutorials as necessary. During the last phase of the writing of the dissertation, students are
expected to submit a first draft, which can then be reviewed and commented upon by the director of
the programme.

The duration of the MA Programme encompasses a twelve month calendar year, beginning at the end
of September and ending with the submission and presentation of the thesis in the following
September. The year is divided into 4 terms of 10-12 weeks each, in which a total of 1800 learning

26
hours are distributed over 45 weeks, resulting in an average of 40 hours per week. Most of the course
teaching takes place in the first two terms, 6 courses are to be taken over Terms 1 and 2 each weighted
with 15 credits. This coursework accounts for 90 out of the 180 credits given, while the Thesis Research
Seminar in Term 3 and the thesis for 90 credits.

The lecture series and other events delivered by the programme in Terms 1 and 2 are held over two
days each week in single or double sessions. Individual tutorials are arranged at convenient times
outside these time slots.

A detailed breakdown of credits is given in the following section. A total of up to 15 credits can be
taken outside the programme by attending other graduate course approved by the programme’s
director and completing the assigned task for that course.

27
 Calendar

Week in Course Credits Breakdown of hours % Award

Term

Term 1

1-10 Readings of Modernity Lectures/Seminars

Marina Lathouri 15 Presentations 8,33%
Tutorials
Research & Essay

1-10 Photography and Lectures/Seminars

Modern Architecture 15 Tutorials 8,33%
Tim Benton Research & Essay

1-10 Lectures/Seminars
Writing Objects and
15 Presentations 8,33%
Non-Objects
Tutorials
Georgios Tsagdis Research & Essay

Term 2

Lectures/Seminars
Architecture Knowledge
2-10 15 Presentations 8,33%
and Writing
Tutorials
Marina Lathouri Research & Essay

2-10 Climate Peace 15 Lectures/Seminars 8,33%

John Palmesino Presentations
Tutorials
Research & Essay

2-10 History as Translation: 15 Seminars 8,33%

HCT/PhD Debates Interview
Marina Lathouri and Guest
Speakers

28
Term 3

Thesis Research Workshop / Seminars

1-10 Seminar 9 Study Trip 5%
Marina Lathouri + Tutorials
HCT Staff Research & Writing
Presentations

Term 4
Thesis:
1-10 Thesis 81 Presentations 45%
Tutorials
Research &
Writing

Total 180 1800 100%

29
 Weekly Schedule

Term 1

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

10:00- Photography and
1:00 Modern Architecture

Tim Benton

2:00-
5:00 Writing Objects Readings of
and Non-Objects Modernity

Georgios Tsagdis Marina Lathouri

Term 2

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

10:00-
1:00 Architecture
Knowledge and
Writing
Marina Lathouri

2:00- Climate Peace

5:00 John Palmesino

4:00- History as
6:00 Translation
HCT&PhD Debates
Marina Lathouri with
Guest Speakers

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Term 1

The lectures, seminars, and writings in Term 1 have the following objectives: to help students reflect
upon and challenge practices of historiography; to develop a deep understanding of the ideological,
political and aesthetic issues inherent to the notion of modernity; to interrogate conceptual
assumptions and visual practices that dominated modern architectural histories and criticism; to get
acquainted with philosophical thought and intellectual discourses that have had impact upon
architectural theories and practices; to explore writing as a practice to think and articulate ideas and
arguments.

Readings of Modernity Marina Lathouri

Photography and Modern Architecture Tim Benton

Writing Objects and Non-Objects Georgios Tsagdis

--------------------------------------
Readings of Modernity
Marina Lathouri

This seminar series examines the role, which different modes of historical and architectural writing -
manifesto, historical narrative, canon, formal analysis, travelogue, critical essay and theoretical
speculation, played in the construction of the numerous histories of modern architecture and the city.
The course interrogates an identifiably modernist vocabulary and discourse that was carefully crafted
and propagated to express specific conceptual and visual organisations of the building, the city, the
spatial and the social, but came to be dismantled in the years immediately prior to 1968. Formal and
functional considerations, economic and ideological constraints, social ideals and political upheavals,
material technologies and cultural products are discussed while reading the texts. Their discrete
languages project ways of thinking the production of the built and evoke aesthetic norms, patterns of
use and social topographies.
The ways in which social and political aspirations become effective arguments in the production of
narratives of architectural and urban modernity and their interaction with visual and material practices
will be central to the discussions.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the course students are expected to be able to do the following:

 Demonstrate a critical understanding of the various, and often conflicting, ways in which the
history of modernism came to be constructed.
 Link these developments in historiography to wider social and political currents.
 Read critically in order to evaluate complex arguments and theories.
 Present conclusions and interpretations about that reading in an informative and well-
organized oral presentation.
 Write a well-structured essay that shows evidence of independent research, makes an
argument clearly and effectively, presents original ideas and conclusions, and uses standard
style for referencing.

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Assessment criteria:

Assessment is based on a 4000-word essay on a subject related to the issues covered in the course,
which is evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:

 Evidence of research and close reading of appropriate sources.

 The capacity to represent the information contained in those sources and the views of various
authors.
 The application of critical faculties to the presentation of these works or texts as evidenced by
a critical and analytical assessment of varied and possibly conflicting arguments or points of
view.
 A clear and definite structure of argument, which establishes and elaborates the student’s own
ideas, opinions, and conclusions.
 Recognition of the larger context of the problem and wider issues raised by the topic.
 Clear formulation of the question addressed in the written submission.
 Appropriate acknowledgement and referencing of sources of information.
 Clarity of formal presentation, including illustrations, graphic or visual materials.

Session 1 | Modernity, modern and modernism

03.10 In the first session, terms, concepts and historiographical categories, which are
used by architects and critics to characterise historical processes and practices, are
introduced and discussed in the context of the various arguments.

Session 2 | Manifesto
10.10 Antonio Sant’ Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture
Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture
Aircraft

Session 3 | Historical narratives

17.10 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition
Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason

Session 4 | Exhibitions and the architectural canon

24.10 Henry Russell-Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design

Session 5 | The plenitude of form

07.11 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the ideal Villa
Colin Rowe and Slutzky, Transparency, Phenomenal and Literal

Session 6 | A Critic Writes: from design to theory

14.11 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
Concrete Atlantis
Scenes in America deserta

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Session 7 | Signs and Types
21.11 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Learning from Las Vegas
Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City

Session 8 | Theory and Criticism

28.11 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture
Architecture and Utopia

Session 9 | What Now? | Discussion and Students Presentations

05.12

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Bibliography

A Global History of Modern Historiography, ed. By G. G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee,
Routledge, 2017

Agamben, Giorgio, Infancy and History, Verso 1993

Architectural Design, AD Profile: 35, On the methodology of architectural history, vol.51, no.6/7, 1981

Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980
Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial building and European modern architecture 1900-1925, The
MIT Press, 1986
Scenes in America deserta, Thames and Hudson, 1982
A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1996

Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life, Penguin Books, 2010.

Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity, Polity 2000

Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications 1992

Behne, Adolf, Modern functional Building, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1996

Behne, Adolf, “Art, Kraft, Technology.” In Figures of Architecture and Thought: German Architecture Culture,
1881-1920 by Francesco Dal Co. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1990

Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Cacciari, Massimo, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture. Yale University
Press, 1993

Colquhoun, Alan, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980-1987. MIT Press, 1989

Conrads, Ulrich, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994

Forty, Adrian, Words and Buildings: a vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000

Giedion, Sigfried, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete, The Getty Center, 1995
Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, (1941) 5th ed. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982

Hayden, White, “Interpretation in History”, New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II
(Winter, 1973), pp. 281-314

Hays, K. Michael, “Reproduction and Negation: the Cognitive Project of the Avant-Garde,” In
Architectureproduction, Edited by B. Colomina, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1988

Heyden, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, The MIT Press, 1999

Harvey, David, The Conditions of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991

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Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Johnson, Philip. The International Style, (1932) New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1995

The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Rizzoli and Columbia
Books of Architecture, 1992

Jameson, Frederic, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso 2002

Kaufmann, Emil, Architecture in the Age of Reason, Harvard University Press, 1955
Kaufmann Emil, “Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Inaugurator of a New Architectural System,” in: Journal of
the American Society of Architectural Historians, no.3, July 1943, p.13

Lathouri, Marina, di Palma, Vittoria and Periton, Diana, The Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the
Modern City, London: Routledge, 2009

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, New York: Dover, 1986

Le Corbusier, Precisions on the present state of architecture and city planning, MIT Press, 1991
Le Corbusier, Aircraft, 1935, 1987

Mertins, Detlef, Modernity Unbound. London: AA Publications, 2011

Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius. 1960

Pevsner on art and architecture: the radio lectures, Methuen Publishing, 2002

Ranciere, Jacques, The Names of History, translated by Hassan Melehy, introduction by Hayden White,
University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Rossi, Aldo, The Architecture of the City, The MIT Press, 1982

Rowe, C., The Mathematics of the ideal Villa and Other Essays, The MIT Press, 1976
Rowe, C. and Slutzky, R., Transparency, Phenomenal and Literal, Birkhauser Publications, Basel 1997

Tafuri, Manfredo, Theories and History of Architecture, New York: Harper and Row, 1979
Tafuri, Manfredo, Architecture and Utopia, MIT Press, 1976

Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, edited by Duanfang Lu, Routledge 2011.

Tournikiotis, Panayotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture. The MIT Press, 1999

Venturi, Robert, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
2nd, revised edition, 1977
Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972

Vidler, Anthony, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. The MIT Press, 2008

35
Photography and Modern Architecture
Tim Benton

The aim of the course is to deepen the students’ understanding of the role of photography in shaping
the development of modern architecture. A central question will be: ‘When did architects start
designing for the photograph and not for the perspective rendering or line drawing?’ A contingent aim
is to understand how architectural photographs are in part, determined by the buildings themselves
and the cameras and techniques available to the photographer.

The main focus is the inter-war period, but there will be some excursions into the periods before and
after. The course also includes a practical element; to understand how cameras worked at different
periods and the limitations they imposed. We will investigate how architectural photographs are
constrained by architectural spaces, available viewpoints, obstructions, distractions, and light sources.
We will also try to determine when architects think specifically about the photographic publication of
their work during the design stage.

The course will cover a range of genres, from amateur snaps taken by well-known architects, to the
work of professional architectural photographers, including the work of ‘art’ photographers such as
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Lucien Hervé. We will also make some comparisons with film. There will be
case studies on the replacement of woodcuts and watercolour renderings by photographs in the
architectural journals, on Le Corbusier’s photography and his use of professional photographs, on the
‘New Photography’ and architecture in the 1920s, on Lucien Hervé and on post-war American
photographers on the West coast. Students will be required to bring a camera (SLR or hybrid) with a
zoom lens (and preferably a wide angle lens) to the practical session (10 October), which will be held
at a London location.

Learning Outcomes:

 Understanding the significance of different forms of representation of architecture

 Understanding the constraints imposed by cameras in the production of architectural
photographs
 Investigating what it might mean to design for the photograph.
 Evaluating different approaches to representing architectural space and form.

Assessment:

 Project essay presented at the final session and subsequently assessed upon:
 Mastery of the aims of the course;
 Clear expression;
 Discursive approach and ability to defend an original argument

Session 1| The role of different media in the exhibition and publication of

03.10 architecture, from 1890-1930

Architects become known in part through their buildings, which can sometimes
be visited and described. But the most important means of publicising their work
rests with exhibition and publication. We will explore how these media changed

36
 and some of the effects they had on architectural design.

Readings
Benton (2006) “Representing Modernity”
Neutra and Shulman (1962) The photographer and the architect
Colomina (1994) Privacy and publicity : modern architecture as mass media

Session 2 | Practical session

10.10
To bring a working camera with a zoom lens that covers at least 28mm (35mm
equivalent) and if possible a wide angle lens. The aim will be to explore the
potential of different focal lengths and apertures, as well as lighting, positioning
and contrast in representing architectural form and space.

Location: RIBA building 66 Portland Place.

Session 3 | Professional architectural photography

24.10
Almost all the essential techniques of architectural photography had been
perfected by 1870. In this session we will look at how professional photographers
worked with large wooden plate cameras, how expert amateurs worked with
more portable versions of the plate camera and what was available at the lower
end of the market. We will look at individual photographers such as Frederick
Evans but also at the professional photographic agencies such as Alinari brothers
in Italy or Abdullah Freres in Turkey and the Middle East. We will also look at
some professional photographers of the interwar period.

Readings
Elwall (2004) Building with light : an international history of architectural photography
Lyden and Evans (2010) The photographs of Frederick H. Evans
Hans P. Kraus, Schaaf et al. (2008) Sun pictures. Catalogue eighteen, Frederick H.
Evans, a logical perfection
Maffioli (2003) Fratelli Alinari, photographers in Florence

Session 4 | Charles-Édouard Jeanneret photographer 1907-1917

07.11
Although he claimed that photographs were only for lazy people, the young Le
Corbusier took a number of photographs between 1907 and 1917 and again in
the 1930s. Beginning with a simple box camera, he progressed to a 9x12cm plate
camera, which also accepted a 6x9cm roll film holder. The photographs he took
in Switzerland, and Germany between 1910 and 1911 were intended for use in a
book on town planning that he was preparing to write. Some of them are of
professional quality. During his voyage to the East, his use of the camera
changed, especially after buying a cheap Kodak Brownie camera in Naples at the
end of the trip. You should look at the first half of my book to prepare for this
session.

Readings
Benton (2013) LC foto : Le Corbusier : secret photographer

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 Le Corbusier and Gresleri (1995) Viaggio in Oriente : Charles Edouard Jeanneret
fotografo e scrittore

Session 5 | Le Corbusier’s use of photographs in his publications

14.11
Once established in Paris, after 1917, Le Corbusier began to use professional
photographs of all kinds in his polemical articles in L’Esprit Nouveau magazine.
To publicise his own work in periodicals and his own books, he exploited the
potential of wide-angle lenses that conformed to his own very wide-angle
sketches. Many of these photographs are in the landscape format and when he
published the first of his Oeuvre Complète books (1930), it was in the landscape
format. This horizontality has a symbolic significance. We will look at the
problem of representing modern architecture in photographs, comparing Le
Corbusier’s practice with that of other modern architects in the interwar period.

Readings
Mazza (2002) Le Corbusier e la fotografia : la vérité blanche
Smet (2007) Vers une architecture du livre Le Corbusier, édition et mise en pages, 1912-
1965
Le Corbusier, Boesiger et al. (1930) Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret : ihr gesamtes
Werk (or the later trilingual edition of this first volume)

Session 6 | The neue fotografie: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Werner Gräff and Sigfried
21.11 Giedion

Modernism in architecture was often represented using the techniques of the

‘new photography’, developed in Hungary and Germany in the 1920s. The aim
was to use destabilising angles and high contrast images to reflect a ‘new vision’.
Moholy-Nagy theorised all this in his books Von Material zur Architektur (known
in English as The New Vision) and in Painting Photography Film. Behind the
aesthetics of the new photography was a view about modern architecture
emphasizing transparency and weightlessness. Sigfried Giedion argues this in his
book Bauen in Frankreich and the large collection of architectural photographs
taken by him provide important material for study.

Readings
Moholy-Nagy and Bauhaus. (2005) The new vision : fundamentals of Bauhaus design,
painting, sculpture, and architecture
Moholy-Nagy, Wingler et al. (1987) Painting, photography, film with a note by Hans M.
Wingler and a postcript by Otto Stelzer translated by Janet Seligman
Gräff (1979) Es kommt der neue Fotograf!
Giedion, S. (1995). Building in France, building in iron, building in ferroconcrete. Giedion,
Oechslin et al. (2010) Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie : Bildinszenierungen der Moderne

38
Session 7 | Representing modern architecture as sculpture: Lucien Hervé’s view of Le
28.11 Corbusier’s post war architecture

Between 1936 and 1938, Le Corbusier obtained a 16mm movie camera. With it
he took over 6,000 still photographs, as well as several sequences of film. These
images are unlike any photographs he had published and approximate to the
aesthetic of the neue fotografie. This ‘secret work’ which was never published in his
lifetime and which he never even printed may help to explain why he selected
Lucien Hervé, a Hungarian artist, to be his official photographer in the 1950s.
Hervé’s high contrast details did not correspond to the norms of architectural
photography and although Le Corbusier was very enthusiastic about them,
tensions sometimes arose between the architect and his photographer. We will
explore Hervé’s work and compare it with other photographic representations of
modern architecture after the war.

Readings
Benton (2013) LC foto : Le Corbusier : secret photographer (the second half of the
book)
Sbriglio (2011) Le Corbusier & Lucien Herve : a dialogue between architect and
photographer
Beer and Hervé (2004) Lucien Hervé : building images

Session 8 | Students Presentations

05.12 The final session will be devoted to presentations and discussion of the ideas and
material for the essays.

39
Further Reading

Beer, O. and L. Hervé (2004). Lucien Hervé : building images. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute
Benton, T. (2006). "Representing Modernity". The Imagined Interior. J. Aynsley. London, V&A
Publications.

Benton, T. (2013). LC foto : Le Corbusier : secret photographer. Baden, London, Lars Müller, Springer
distributor

Colomina, B. (1994). Privacy and publicity : modern architecture as mass media. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press

Elwall, R. (2004). Building with light : an international history of architectural photography. London, Merrell
Giedion, S., et al. (2010). Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie : Bildinszenierungen der Moderne. Zèurich, GTA
Verlag

Giedion, S. (1995). Building in France, building in iron, building in ferroconcrete. Santa Monica, CA, Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities

Gräff, W. (1979). Es kommt der neue Fotograf! New York, Arno Press

Hans P. Kraus, Jr., et al. (2008). Sun pictures. Catalogue eighteen, Frederick H. Evans, a logical perfection. New
York, H.P. Kraus, Jr.
Le Corbusier, et al. (1930). Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret : ihr gesamtes Werk. Zürich,, Girsberger

Le Corbusier and G. Gresleri (1995). Viaggio in Oriente : Charles Edouard Jeanneret fotografo e scrittore.
Venezia, Paris, Marsilio, Fondation Le Corbusier

Lyden, A. M. and F. H. Evans (2010). The photographs of Frederick H. Evans. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty
Museum

Maffioli, M. (2003). Fratelli Alinari, photographers in Florence. Florence, Alinari

Mazza, B. (2002). Le Corbusier e la fotografia : la vérité blanche. Firenze, Firenze university press

Moholy-Nagy, L. and Bauhaus. (2005). The new vision : fundamentals of Bauhaus design, painting, sculpture, and
architecture. Mineola, NY, Dover
Moholy-Nagy, L., et al. (1987). Painting, photography, film with a note by Hans M. Wingler and a postcript by
Otto Stelzer translated by Janet Seligman. Cambridge (Mass.), the MIT press

Neutra, R. and J. Shulman (1962). "The photographer and the architect". Photographing architecture and
interiors. New York, Whitney: vi.
Sbriglio, J. (2011). Le Corbusier & Lucien Herve : a dialogue between architect and photographer. Los Angeles,
Calif., Getty Publications

Smet, C. d. (2007). Vers une architecture du livre Le Corbusier, édition et mise en pages, 1912-1965. Baden
(Suisse), L. Muller

40
Writing Objects and Non-Objects
Georgios Tsagdis

The object determines in modern occidental thought not only the totality of the world, but the totality of
thought itself. No objectivity without the object, but also no subjectivity: in fact, no subject. The subject
emerges as a correlate of the postulated object, as the latter’s substantiality is determined by Descartes as
extension. The object amounts thus to the fixity, stability and permanence of an extended thing. In turn, the
world becomes objective.

This course queries the object, by examining how this notion is recast in the 20th and 21st century,
retracing the horizon of enquiry and opening thus a space of unprecedented creativity. Heidegger’s things,
Benjamin’s works of art, Derrida’s traces, Deleuze’s becomings, Serres’s quasi-objects, Latour’s networks,
Morton’s hyperobjects and Bennett's thing-power are the provisional foci around which this space
articulates itself, the foci from which our writing of non-objects begins.

In a series of close readings, the course engages directly with primary texts, in order to familiarise you with
diverse philosophical styles and help you thus craft original responses to questions surrounding the
objectivity of the object, its status and the manifold counter-figurations that can help interpret and
transform the world, in radical, promising ways. Although clearly defined, the spectrum of theoretical
positions encompassed by the course is deliberately broad. In order to sustain the focus on primary texts, a
rather limited amount of secondary bibliography is given, as a suggestion of further directions, rather than
as commentary on the course’s readings. Independent research will be required to enhance these readings,
but more importantly your own analytical, critical and synthetic skills in order to open up and engage with
the texts. Each session comprises of one primary and one or two secondary readings, all of which are
integral. You are advised to go through the secondary readings ahead of the term, to allow enough time
during the term to read the primary texts.

Learning Outcomes:

 To form a clear understanding of the tradition in which the notion of the object emerged and how
it informed subjectivity, relationality and worldhood.
 To obtain a comprehensive appreciation of the responses of the past century to the impasses of
the object-paradigm.
 To be able to reflect critically, compare and evaluate these responses.
 To apply this spectrum of theoretical insights to things surrounding us, things we encounter as
well as things we use and make.
 To appreciate diverse stylistic modes of rigorous philosophical writing. To be able to explore,
adopt and adapt elements these modes in one’s own writing, while preserving one’s own voice.
 To become familiar with the practice of close reading.
 To develop a theoretical vocabulary, which will extend beyond the aims of the course.

Assessment Criteria:

Assessment is on the basis of a 4000-word essay on a single or manifold assemblage of objects, or non-
objects, presented, analysed and creatively transformed through at least one of the theoretical approaches
examined during the course. Writing criteria:

 A clear understanding, presentation and analysis of the theory from within which the essay
operates—critically or not.

41
  Structured, forceful argumentation, supported by textual evidence and research beyond the
primary sources.
 Imagination, creativity, novelty in both the explication and use of ideas, as well as in the style of
expression. Integration of form and content.
 In case you decide to use more than a single theoretical approach in your analysis, attentiveness to
the potential for congruence, as well as to the historic and theoretical aspects that support or
complicate the synthesis the different approaches.
 Appropriate referencing and bibliography, commensurate to your level of study.

You will also be expected to give, in turn, short presentations (15 mins) of the texts and themes of each
session. Although these presentations are not assessed, they are essential to the successful completion of
the course. You can build upon your presentation towards the final essay. Consider which session you
would like to present, as allocation will take place on the first session.

Session 1 | René Descartes — Extensive Objectivity

02.10
Descartes does not question the existence of objects. In the Principles of Philosophy (1644),
he writes: “there is no one who is not sufficiently convinced that material objects exist.”
The nature of objectivity appears to be the sole remaining question. This nature Descartes
will unequivocally determine as extension, that is, length, breadth and depth. In a radical
delineation, body and matter, are also reduced to extension. Accordingly, physics is
reducible to geometry or abstract mathematics. The implications are vast. These objects
appear strange today—haunted by the notion of mass, struggling to be individuated. Such
problems are compounded by the tenuous relation of un-extended, immaterial subjects to
extended, material objects.

Whether sense perception and imagination lend sufficient support to this relation, as the
Meditations (1641) claim, remains to be thought. It also remains to be thought whether the
definition of body and mater as extension suffices to answer the question: what is an
object? Our opening session sets the stage, by confronting the Cartesian text, appreciating
its epochal potential and outlining its productive limitations. Finally, in order to prepare
our passage to the 20th century, we touch on a series of responses and reconfigurations of
the object that paved the way to contemporary thought.

Readings
Primary: Descartes, René, Principles of Philosophy, transl. by V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller,
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1982. [Specifically Part II: On The Principles of
Material Objects, pp. 37-77.]
Secondary: Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. and transl. by J. Cottingham,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [Specifically Sixth Meditation: The existence
of material things and the real distinction between mind and body, pp. 50-62.]

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Session 2 | Martin Heidegger — Thinking the Thing
09.10

From the beginning of his thought, Heidegger deliberately sidesteps the use of the notion
of the object, fraught by the tradition of occidental metaphysics. In this session we focus
on Heidegger’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), in which things, equipment and
the work (of art) are juxtaposed and distinguished, to bring to light the distinctive function
of the work, in making the confrontation of the earth and the world emerge—thus
opening up a space for the event of truth. This reading which sparked a controversy
around the status of the work of art, we enhance with Being and Time’s (1927) demarcation
of the notion of worldhood, which will be significant for The Origin, as well as for the late
essay The Thing (1950), which forms a key counterpoint to the latter.

The Thing examines the effects of technology, in particular commute and communication
technologies, as they drive towards the abolition of distance. However, this de-distancing
does not achieve nearness, not least because we cannot encounter nearness directly, but
only through what is near. What is near, Heidegger calls the thing, offering a radical re-
signification vis-à-vis The Origin. Here, unlike an object, the thing is not merely before us,
but rather shows forth. It is its emergence, either through craftsmanship or through un-
concealed-ness that Heidegger explores, showing how a world unfolds and arranges itself
around the thing.

Readings
Primary: Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Off the Beaten Track, trnsl.
by J. Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Secondary: Heidegger, Martin, “The Thing”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trnsl. by Albert
Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 2001.
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, transl. by J. Stambaugh. New York: SUNY, 1996.
[Specifically 1.III: The Worldliness of the World, pp. 59-105.]

Session 3 | Walter Benjamin — Re-producing the object of art

16.10
While the overall gesture of Benjamin’s seminal The Work of Art (1936) is one of a
historically embedded art-politics (Kunstpolitik), the implications are as current today, as
they were at the time of its composition. The question that motivates Benjamin in this
essay concerns the effects of mass production of objects on their constitution and our
relation towards them. These effects are shared by objects of nature and objects of art, but
are exemplary in the case of the latter.

Traditionally, a work of art was shrouded in an aura, produced by the status of its
uniqueness, the fixity of its presence to the here and the now of its material conditions;
for the most part, hierarchic and exclusive. Modern technology undoes this status,
bringing with it for Benjamin a revolutionary promise. It does not merely reproduce
already given artworks, but its works are rather destined from the outset to reproduction.
By blurring the distinction of original and copy it forces us to consider, not only whether

43
 the reproduced thing is still a work of art, but to redefine the notion of art, of its work and
its objects. It forces us to reconsider the object.

Readings
Primary: Benjamin, Walter, “The Work or Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility”, in The Work or Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other
Writings on Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Seconday: Benjamin, Walter, “Experience and Poverty”, in Selected Writings II.2 (1931-1934),
ed. by M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith, trnsl. by R. Livingstone and Others,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Session 4 | Jacques Derrida — Difference, Trace, Khôra

06.11
In this session our object is the object of writing—writing about objects, as much as this
peculiar object that we call writing. We soon come to understand writing, not in the
limited sense of ink on paper, but as general inscription: computational and genetic codes,
tattooing and road networks are such inscriptions.

Against the background of this generalised notion of inscription, Derrida questions the
status of writing as a derivative object representing the fullness of presence of the voice or
thought. There are no self-sufficient, self-referential, enclosed signs, but signs are always
inscribed and thus always only signify within a system. The difference of one sign from an
other, is what makes them significant. This systematic play of difference, Derrida begins to
approach through the playful notion of differánce. In the eponymous lecture and essay
(1968), static Saussurean semiology is set into motion. Difference is not only structural
(we might say spatial), but also temporal, it is deferral. Differánce forever defers the arrival
at the plenitude of presence. The play between difference and deferral, between space and
time, Derrida sums up in the notion of the trace. The trace is the most peculiar object:
neither present, nor absent, its play establishes the relation, each time unique, between the
two orders. Our reading of Differánce is complemented by Ousia and Grammé (1968), an
essay of the same year, as well as by Khôra (1993), which thematises a Platonic notion as
strange as that of the trace: khôra is the very matrix of inscriprability, a non-space that
gives space, a profound indeterminacy that supports all determination.

Readings
Primary: Derrida, Jacques, “Differánce”, in Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press,
1982.
Secondary: Derrida, Jacques, “Ousia and Grammé”, in Margins of Philosophy, Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques, “Khôra”, in On the Name, transl. by D. Wood, J. P. Leavey Jr. and I.
McLeod, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Session 5 | Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — Becoming and Haecceity

13.11
More than any of the course’s challenging authors, Deleuze and Guattari present a radical
linguistic and terminological challenge. Traditional and familiar notions are recast,
polarities are drawn and redrawn, new landscapes of expression emerge forming a tightly
interwoven conceptual web. Reading selectively, and—according to its own
programmatic—non-linearly, from A Thousand Plateaus (1980), we unravel our exploration

44
 around the notion of haecceity, a medieval term that designates ‘thisness’ as opposed to
quiddity or ‘whatness’, a binary that corresponds directly to that of existence and essence.
Deleuze and Guattari appropriate haecceity, as the locus of an individuation, which does
not proceed by forms, but rather passes through becomings—becomings that at specific
moments aggregate into consistencies or compositions which can appear as distinctly
individual. Such becomings operate along the vectors of animality, womanhood,
blackness, or again imperceptibility and intensity. As opposed to majoritarian substances,
becomings are always minoritarian. Haecceities are thus the fleeting arrests of becomings
and as such, recast objecthood into radical, non-hierarchical singularities.

From haecceities we gain access to the notion of the rhizome, along the unfolding of
which haecceities appear and without which they cannot be understood. The rhizome is
composed of lines of segmnentarity, lines of stratification and finally lines of flight,
subverting and deterritorialising territorial assemblages. It is finally the rhizomatic body
without organs which helps us understand the notion that Deleuze and Guattari take from
psychoanalysis, namely that of partial objects: symbolic objects that fix desire. In Deleuze
and Guattari, the body without organs becomes the material of partial objects, while the
latter constitute its powers, its degrees of intensity, through which the real in space is
produced.

Readings
Primary: Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, transl. by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005.
[Specifically Chapter 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…, pp.
232-309.]
Secondary: Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl.
by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005. [Specifically Chapter 1:
Introduction: Rhizome, pp. 3-25; and Chapter 15: Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract
Machines, pp. 501-514.]

Session 6 | Michel Serres – The Parasitical Quasi-Object

20.11
Exemplary rhizomatic is the relation of the orchid and the wasp, as much as that of the
virus and the host. The intuition of Deleuze and Guattari, that: “we form a rhizome with
our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals,” Michel
Serres unfolds extensively in The Parasite (1980), published the same year as A Thousand
Plateaus. More than the biologic relations of symbiosis and parasitism are here explored.

The quasi-object complicates parasitical structures. A ball in a football game—Serres’s

example of choice—is such a quasi-object: it its fleeting transitions it weaves a web of
relations, established by a code of rules that regulate its motion. Similarly, words and
money are linguistic and economic quasi-objects, weaving in their passage the conditions
of our existence: in their motion defining common, in their rest, individual being.
We supplement these key reflections on the quasi-object, with two essays from the Hermes
project (Mathematics & Philosophy: What Thales Saw… and The Origin of Geometry), which
complicate and deepen the Cartesian mathematisation of physical reality showing how
communication, mimesis and notation are at the heart of the confrontation of logos with
irrational number, a confrontation that on closer examination relates a sacrificial history.
Readings
Primary: Serres, Michel, The Parasite, transl. by L. R. Schehr, Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1982. [Specifically Theory of the Quasi-Object, pp. 224-234.]

45
 Secondary: Serres, Michel, “Mathematics & Philosophy: What Thales Saw…”, in Hermes:
Literature, Science, Philosophy, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982, pp.84-97
Serres, Michel, “The Origin of Geometry”, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, London:
The John Hopkins University Press, 1982, pp.125-133.

Session 7 | Bruno Latour – On Networks: Objects in Action

27.11
For Bruno Latour objects are agents that must be questioned. An object is neither the
material base, nor the backdrop of social action, but thoroughly integrated and thus
inextricable from the action and must accordingly be approached and analysed as such. In
order to succeed in this analysis the function of networks must be understood. Actor-
Network-Theory (ANT), proposes to understand networks anew in order to redefine the
social. For such a redefinition a new understanding of objecthood is necessary. As the
activity of the objects begins to become manifest the social draws closer to its etymology,
re-signified as the socius, the link, bond or nexus, through which groups and institutions
cohere and persist. In the web of the social, objects are not merely neutral intermediaries
that produce or reproduce reductive chains of causality, but appear rather as mediators,
which trace patterns of coexistence. Understanding objects anew with Latour we move
from maters of fact to matters of concern, with far reaching implications for the
present—but already long-diagnosed—crisis of truth.

Readings
Primary: Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the social, an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005. [Specifically, Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have
Agency, pp. 63-86.]
Secondary: Latour, Bruno, “On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus more than a
few complications”, Soziale Welt, vol. 47, 1996, pp. 369-381.
Latour, Bruno, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”,
Critical Enquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 225-248.

Session 8 | Jane Bennett – Thing-Power: On the Agency of Matter

04.12
Bennett draws on Latour's ideas of agency, which she inlays with a tradition of
materialism that runs trough Democritus and Epicurus and passes through Spinoza's
master-notion of the conatus, the power that allows bodies that share a single substance —
that is, all bodies —to form alliances. In this trajectory, she also assumes Bergson's
vitalism as it is articulated in Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of vitality's immanence
in matter-energy. She equates accordingly affect with materiality, while at the same time
rejecting the opposition of life and matter that guided traditional vitalism. Through these
elective affinities, Bennett is able to amplify some of the most constructive elements in the
thought of numerous key figures examined in the course, while establishing a unique
voice, able to address ontological as much as political questions, by foregrounding the
activity of nonhuman bodies.

Readings
Primary: Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things, London: Duke University
Press, 2010. [Specifically, Preface, pp. vii-xix; and Chapter 1: The Force of Things, pp. 1-19.]
Secondary: Bennett, Jane, “Encounters with an Art-Thing,” Evental Aesthetics vol. 3, no. 3,
2015, pp. 91-110.

46
 Bennett, Jane, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy
Morton,” New Literary History vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 225-233.

Session 9 | Discussion of Essay Drafts

06.12

Our last session gives us an opportunity to examine and explore your ideas in the making. Be prepared to
share your work in progress and to let the latter be inspired by the work of your peers.

Further Literature:

Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, transl. by Sh. F. Glaser, United States of America: University of
Michigan Press, 1995.
Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, transl. by J. Benedict, London: Verso, 2005.

Bryant, Levy R., The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2005.

Cache, Bernard, Earth Moves, transl. by A. Boyman, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
Cache, Bernard, Projectiles, London: Architectural Association, 2011.

Candlin Fiona and Guins, Raiford (eds.), The Object Reader. London: Routledge, 2009.

Daston, Lorraine, Things that Talk. New York: Zone Books, 2004.
Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter, Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.

Faber, Roland and Goffey, Andrew (eds.), The Allure of Things: Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy,
London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Harman, Graham, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago: Open Court, 2002.
Harman, Graham, The Quadruple Object, London: Zone Books, 2011.
Harman, Graham, Art + Objects, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Harman, Graham, "The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism", New Literary
History vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 183-203.

Honneth, Axel (with J. Butler, R. Geuss and J. Lear), Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008.

Morton, Timothy, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology”, Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 163-190.
Morton, Timothy, "An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry", New Literary History vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp.
205-224.
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 2013.

47
Term 2

The courses, debates, workshop and events of Term 2 provide a framework for critical enquiry into
the history of the discipline in relation to contemporary issues and emerging forms of architecture and
history research and practice. The aim is two-fold: to frame the question of the contemporary from a
historical, theoretical, and trans-disciplinary point of view; to expand disciplinary knowledge in a broad
cultural and political arena and investigate modes of engagement with changing territorial, social and
political formations.

Architecture Knowledge and Writing Marina Lathouri

Climate Peace John Palmesino

History as Translation Marina Lathouri with Guest Speakers

HCT & PhD Open Debates

Deep Description Fabrizio Gallanti and Marina

Critical Writing Workshop Lathouri

---------------------------------
Architecture Knowledge and Writing
Marina Lathouri

This series of seminars starts by looking at early architectural writings, the ways in which they identify
and describe the object of architecture and the practice of the architect. It follows the historical
process of the formation of disciplinary knowledge, paying particular attention to the search for
origins, universal language and autonomy in the 18th century, the concepts of history and space in Formatted: Superscript
relation to the establishment of the first schools of architecture in the 19th century and the Formatted: Superscript
introduction of architectural historiography as distinct field of study. The series provides the students
with the historical terms necessary to move towards an understanding of contemporary architecture
cultures, the technologies and the multiple formats within which these are produced and
communicated.

Two short writing exercises through the term are to relate specific architectural arguments to a
broader constellation of meanings and processes.

The series will conclude with the two-week seminar on critical writing Deep Description, with our
visiting tutor Fabrizio Gallanti.

Learning Outcomes:
 To understand the criticality of the issue of writing in the production of knowledge specific to
architecture
 To be clear about the function of theory and history in the practice of architecture
 To understand different forms of study and discourse
 To be able to relate architectural arguments and projects to a broader intellectual arena and public
culture
 To form an understanding of cross-disciplinary relationships between architecture and other fields
of thought and practice.

48
Assessment:
Assessment is based on the participation in the seminars and the two writing assignments. These will
be evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:

 The capacity to read and analyse a text in relation to a particular set of historical conditions but
also within a greater field of references
 The capacity to understand and synthesise complex theories
 The construction of a clearly defined and structured argument which establishes and develops the
student’s view of a specific problem
 The capacity to produce short and critical studies
 The capacity to communicate complex ideas and articulate them clearly.
 A clear understanding of the nature of the relations between disciplines.

Sessions 1/2 Writing Architecture: The Formation of a Discipline

From the Renaissance treatise to the philosophical essay, the Encyclopedie, the
Dictionnaire, the manifesto, the design guide and recent theoretical articulations, it
is through writing that architecture is fashioned and propagated as a distinct form
of knowledge and set of professional practices. The economy of the literary
object elicits an intricate relation to the economy of the built object – its
production, aesthetic norms, didactic and historical value, its uses and effects.

These sessions examine the beginning of the historical process of the formation
of the disciplinary and professional territory of architecture through Leon Battista
Alberti’s writings and the diffusion of classical notions of aesthetic theory. The
aesthetic and intellectual theories of the time and the role of the written text will
be considered in the political and economic context of the Renaissance city and
in relation to the increased pace of publishing and circulation of new ideas in the
Quattrocento.

Sessions 3/4 Writing History: Tradition and Modernity

This session looks at how the concept of history in architecture was joined since
the Renaissance to interpretations of the past and visions for the future. It traces
this through the reading of antiquity in Late Renaissance, the search for general
principles and universal language of form in the 18th century and the
contemporaneous notions of progress and modernity.

Finally, by examining the concept of the ‘point of view’ in the discipline of

history, the seminar discusses how historical evidence has always been
determined and arranged by questions, which arise in the present. In these terms,
histories often tend to inaugurate modernity and produce a discourse to work in
unison with innovative practices.

Session 5 Writing I

49
Session 6 Writing the City
With the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern subjectivity, approaches
toward history and the production of forms take a different turn. Beginning with
an introduction to Kant’s notion of critique, this session concentrates on critique
as particular form of discourse, in conjunction with the ‘making of a social body’
and the gradual conception and planning of the city as urban territory and open
system. The ways in which the nineteenth century city becomes a political tool,
and the newly formed discipline of urban planning a demonstration of shifting
forms of political authority and jurisdiction rather than projection of ideal
representations of a social order, will be extensively discussed.

Session 7 Writing the Object (Marina Lathouri)

Under conditions of hybrid cultures and vacillating national and social
boundaries, can the object of architecture be forged through a universal language
or a teleological postulate of an ultimate fusion of all cultural horizons? If we
consider that it is no longer possible to set the boundaries of the cultures in
question, and that the mode of their exchange is in fact constitutive of their
identity, can the practices of architecture be understood as processes and forms
of negotiation?

Session 8 Writing II

Bibliography

Adorno T.W., “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique
32 (Spring–Summer 1984)

Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, MIT Press, 1988

Barthes, Roland, Image Text Music trans. by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977

Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media,
Cambridge, Mass., London, 2008

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, New York, Schocken Books,
1969

Bermann S. and Wood M., Nation, language and the ethics of translation, Princeton University Press, 2005

Carpo, Mario, Architecture in the Age of Printing, MIT Press 2001

Carpo, Mario, Alphabet and the algorithm, The MIT Press, 2011

Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis, Precis of the lectures on architecture, with Graphic portion of the lectures on
architecture, Getty Research Institute, 2000

Evans, Robin, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, London: Janet Evans and
Architectural Association Publications, 1997.

50
Forty, Adrian, Words and Buildings, Thames & Hudson, 2000

Hays, K. Michael (ed), Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000

Jarzombek, Mark, On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories, MIT Press 1989

Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis, The MIT Press, 1988

Laugier, Marc Antoine, Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Hermann, Los Angeles:
Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977

Le Goff, Jacques, History and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992

Lomax, Yve, Figure, calling, Copy Press, 2017

Mallgrave, Harry-Francis, Empathy, form and space: problems in German aesthetics 1873-1893, Getty
Research Institute, 1994

Palladio, Andrea, The Four Books on Architecture, translated by Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield,
The MIT Press, 2002

Perspective, Projections and Design Technologies of Architectural Representation, edited by Mario Carpo and
Frederique Lemerle, Routledge, 2008

Pope, Alexander, An Essay on Criticism. 1711

Queneau, Raymond, Exercises in Style, Alma Classics, 2013

Rabinow, Paul, Ed, The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984

Raman, Pattabi G. and Coyne, Richard, ‘The Production of Architectural Criticism’, in: Architecture
Theory Review, The University of Sydney, vol. 5, No 1, 2000, pp. 83-103

Ranciere, Jacques, Politics of aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London, 2008.

Ricoeur, Paul, On Translation, Routledge, 2006

Serlio, Sebastiano, On Architecture, translated by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, Yale University Press,
2005

Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton
University Press 2006

Tafuri, Manfredo, Interpreting Renaissance: princes, cities, architects, Yale University Press, 2006

Vidler, Anthony, Writing of the walls: architectural theory in the late Enlightenment, Princeton Architectural
Press, 1986

Wigley, Mark, “Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture”, in: Assemblage, No.15, 08/1991

51
Design by Words 7 | Deep Description
Two-week seminar/workshop on critical writing with Fabrizio Gallanti and Marina Lathouri

In his seminal essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” (1973),
anthropologist Clifford Geertz delineated the characteristic of “thick description”, a complex account
that ethnographers should produce as a way of providing cultural context and meaning surrounding
human behaviours, opposed to ‘thin description”, merely stating data and facts. According to Geertz
an ethnographer must present a thick description, which is composed not only of facts but also of
commentary, interpretation and interpretations of those comments and interpretations.

The seminar, following on Architecture Knowledge and Writing, proposes to transfer such an attitude
towards the reading and interpretation of architecture and the built environment. This intention is
based on the assumption, expressed by Umberto Eco in his essay “Proposte per una Semiologia
dell’Architettura” (1967), that architectural thinking was the last trace of a humanist approach as it
synthesizes numerous and different forces, sometimes contradictory, that are combined in the design
process.

A “deep description” of realized buildings, projects, infrastructural arrangements, urban spaces and
territories can provide a complex narrative of the overall context within which space is produced. The
main hypothesis of “deep description” is that of a continuous system of feedback loops, that
conceives built and designed architectural projects as the points of convergence of multiple economic,
political and social forces, rather than the expression of creative authorship, disengaged by the
constraints of reality. The feedback loop operates as a circle: analysing and describing a finite object, a
museum building or a school, for instance, allow to identify clues and proofs of its uses and
functioning but also of the implicit ideological position at the basis of its design. Permeating the
debates around such an object, not just within architectural culture but also including economic,
political, policy-making, urbanistic and planning discourses, posits the architectural piece within a
wider landscape.

The act of description as a device to interpret and therefore implicitly advance design hypotheses has a
peculiar tradition within architectural culture. One could read the travel annotations of Le Corbusier,
the photographic record of modern USA by Eric Mendelsohn, the journalistic records from Chicago
by Adolf Loos as precursors of such approach, that has resurfaced in different moments during the
XX century (Aldo Rossi or “Learning from Las Vegas” or “”Delirious New York” or “Made in
Tokyo”). But architecture critics and writers have also used the array of analytical tools proper to the
discipline to compose detailed inquiries within urban conditions, as a means to understand society as a
whole, as in the case of Reyner Banham’s travels across Los Angeles or the American Desert.

Structure

The course is composed of two elements:

The first is a series of analytical readings and interpretations of texts, conceived as references, both for
the conceptual framework within which they are developed and for the literary and stylistic qualities.

The readings will be developed following a seminar structure, conducted by 1 or 2 students, who will
have the responsibility to identify a series of questions arising from the texts and to direct the
conversation. All students will be required to read and prepare annotation and comments for the
seminar. The key objective of the sessions is to identify through which techniques of observation and

52
writing, authors construe a coherent argument and how the specific case studies selected by each
author are then used to illustrate general concepts.

The second is a descriptive exercise that will take the form of a series of consecutive short essays.

Each student will be required to produce a descriptive exercise, in the form of a series of sequential
essays all dedicated to the same object, presented in the format of a “cahier”, with the intention of
creating a small collection of publications.

The essays will follow established protocols, trying to respect the basic rules of journalism, responding
to the canonical five Ws (who, when, where, what and why) + the H of the “how”.

The essays will be mostly based on direct observation. The progressive accumulation of these
“cahiers” over consecutive courses will generate an atlas of contemporary London.

Indicative Bibliography

Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples” (1924).

Joan Didion, “The Getty” (1977) and ”Many Mansions” (1977) from “The White Album”.

Vincent Scully, “An architecture which is a whole” (1964) (https://placesjournal.org/article/future-

archive-an-architecture-which-is-whole)

Rem Koolhaas, “Definitive Instability: The Downtown Athletic Club” (1978) from “Delirious New
York”.

Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Whitney’s Bold New Look (1966) and “Boston’s New City Hall” (1966)
from the New York Times.

Jonathan Massey, “Risk Design” (2013) (http://we-aggregate.org/piece/risk-design)

General References

Ian Nairn, “Modern Buildings in London” (1964), London Transport.

Ian Nairn, “Nairn’s London” (1966 - reissued in 2014), Penguin Books.

53
Climate Peace
John Palmesino

Architecture is the agent of the relation between polities and their spaces of operation. The rise of the
new climatic regime and the magnitude of the techno-sphere baffle architecture: from within it
appears as the result of the multiple projects, designs, actions and processes of humans, within the
remit of control and capacity to act. From the outset, humans are only a component of it, drawn into
its functioning and endeavouring for its sustainment.

The seminar is dedicated to investigate specific conditions where this inversion of agency affects
narratives of modernisation and the appreciation for the deep interconnections between architectural
development, rapid urbanisation and human impact on the Earth System. These challenges are wide
and require time to rethink the approach to history and critical thought in architecture in a number of
ways. The development of the course in this sense would focus on five main questions:

 How to evaluate architecture amid the energy and material fluxes characterising the rise of the
Anthropocene
 How to investigate notions of value and its associated narratives, myths, and theories at a time
of complex communication systems and globalisation.
 How to asses codes and protocols to insure a democratic right to the transformation of the
city at a time of deep automation and the rise of artificial intelligence systems.
 How to articulate new notions of entanglement between architecture and the biosphere, both
in theoretical and aesthetic turns, at a time of vast extinctions and climate change.
 How to link enlarged notions of agency to authorship and authority in architecture, to ensure
responsible development and new forms of ethical evaluation.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the seminar series students are expected to be able to do the following:
 Conduct independent critical inquiries into the transformation of material spaces of operation
of contemporary polities.
 Demonstrate a critical thought on the relation between modernisation, globalisation and
urban construction and transformation processes
 Demonstrate capacity to relate architectural and urban development studies to contemporary
cultural studies
 Link these developments in architectural culture to wider social, economic, political and
cultural discourses and practices.
 Read critically in order to evaluate complex policies, spatial practices and transformation
processes.
 Present conclusions and interpretations about that reading in an informative and well-
organised oral presentation.
 Undertake independent research with minimum guidance.
 Write a well-structured research report that shows evidence of independent research, makes
an argument clearly and effectively, presents original ideas and conclusions, and uses standard
style for referencing.

Assessment:

54
Assessment is based on a 2,500-word illustrated research report on a specific territorial or urban
transformation, which is evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:
• The evidence of research and a close reading of appropriate sources, with particular attention to
different modes of institutional, technical, policy, and expert writing, as well as investigative
journalism writing.

• The capacity to represent the information contained in those sources and the views of various
authors.
• The application of critical faculties to the presentation of these works or texts as evidenced by a
critical and analytical assessment of varied and possibly conflicting arguments or points of view.

• A clear and definite structure of argument, which establishes and elaborates the student’s own ideas,
opinions, and conclusions.

• Recognition of the larger context of the problem and wider issues raised by the topic.
• Clear formulation of the question addressed in the written submission.

• Appropriate acknowledgement and referencing of sources of information.

• Clarity of formal presentation, including illustrations, graphic or visual materials.

• A capacity to apply knowledge gained within the context of the M.A. as a whole to the issue at hand.

• An attempt to bring creativity or innovation to the work.

55
Bibliography

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2007

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, London and New York: Routledge 2000
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press
2001
Sarat Maharaj, ‘Xenoepistemics’, in Documenta 11 Platform 5, Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz, 2002
Aiwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship, Durham and London: Duke University Press 1999
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Missesota Press
1996
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005
Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Empire, 2000
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France
Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.) ‘Democracy Unrealized’, Documenta 11 Platforms, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz
2002
Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.) ‘Under Siege: Four African Cities–Freetown’, Johannesburg, Kinshasa,
Lagos. Documenta 11 Platform 4, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2002
Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.) ‘Creolité and Creolization’, Documenta 11 Platforms, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz
2002
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Durham and London:
Duke University Press 2008
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press
2015
Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Rem Koolhaas, et al., Mutations, Barcelona: Actar 2000
Multiplicity, USE Uncertain states of Europe, Milan: Skira 2003
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000
Scott Lash, James Urry, Economies of Signs and Space
Bruno Latour, We have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press 1993
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2007
Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton
University Press 2006
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge 1994
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity 2000
Michel Feher, Non Governmental Politics, New York: Zone Books 2007
Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (eds.), The Endless City, London: Phaidon Press 2010
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All, Piracy and the Law of Nations, New York: Zone Books 2009
Immanuel Wallerstein, World System Analysis, Durham: Duke University Press 2004
David Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1991
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications 1992

56
History as Translation
HCT & PhD Debates with Marina Lathouri and guest speakers

The Debates, a joint MA and PhD seminar, provide a venue for exchange of ideas and arguments.
External speakers are invited every week, to position multiple voices and make possible a process of
thinking in common, which is by definition a pedagogical practice different from the seminar or the
lecture. The sessions are open to the public.

This year, in conjunction with the AA project Architecture in Translation we will use the notion and
practices of translation to read processes and languages of history in unforeseen ways.

Every time brings specific conditions to the manner in which the claims on the past and the present
are made. Whereas new technologies and forms of production have prompted elaborate arguments on
economic policies, environmental strategies and sustainable development patterns, there seems to be a
lack of reflection on the fundamental question of history. History is a composite form of knowledge
and a distinct set of practices in intricate relationship with cultural economies, national and territorial
claims and material configurations.

On the other hand, architecture as the material and technical appropriation of land, history and
memory constitutes a complex site of power, of technics and aesthetics. As such, it unavoidably
contributes to the language in which ideas of home, of belonging, of the near, the far and the foreign,
are conceived and received. Is it then possible to proceed through a critical body of architectural
references, existing or to be constituted, in order to rethink conceptions of time, conceptual and
material appropriations of the past, and possible futures?

At a time where the very concept of the ‘human’ is frequently suspended, who and how will write
histories which might open up the possibility of other histories and cultures, a different aesthetics, a
different politics of inhabiting the Earth in the vicinity of others who may refuse our terms of
translation. Translation, according to Umberto Eco, is a ‘negotiation’ between different and even
opposite systems and beliefs, and is always anchored in time and space. It is a process, which may
create identities, but can also cancel or oppress.

It is precisely the multiple articulations of constantly evolving interfaces – disciplinary, historical, social
and political, and the multiple negotiations of frontiers, which are proposed to visiting speakers, tutors
and students as the locus of debate.

Learning Outcomes and Assessment:

The students are expected to prepare questions and observations based upon preliminary reading and
conduct an interview with one of the speakers.

By the end of the series students should be able to do the following:

 Demonstrate an understanding of the complexity of historiographical practices as they relate to
theoretical arguments as well as material processes and complex communication systems
 Evaluate the relation between history and critical thinking
 Undertake self-directed research and reading, and participate in discussions based on
considered responses to presentations and arguments
 Apply critical faculties to formulate clear questions and engage with the views of a speaker

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Term 3

Thesis Research Seminar Marina Lathouri | HCT Staff

Reading and Writing Seminar Anthony Vidler

MA Trip Marina Lathouri

Open Jury HCT Staff and Guest Critics

Term 4

Thesis Writing | Group Presentations | Individual Tutorials

Final Presentations

Assigned Reading Material

Assigned reading for weekly sessions can be found in the AA Library on shelves reserved for the History
and Critical Thinking programme, under the course title.

These may be borrowed on overnight loan (after 5 p.m.) or weekends and must be returned by 10:30 the
following or Monday morning. If problems arise from late returns of reserved material then their use will
be restricted to library hours only. The bookshops listed in the following pages generally stock the course
reading material.

A copy of the Architectural Association Guide to the Library includes an introduction to the catalogue system
used at the AA Library and useful reference sources. Copies are available in the Library.

Photocopy machines are available in the Library and in the Graduate School.

LIBRARIES

Architectural Association Library

36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES tel.: 7887 4032

The Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning

University College London,
Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1 tel.: 7387 7050

The British Architectural Library

Royal Institute of British Architects, 66 Portland Place, London W1 tel.: 7580 5533
This library is primarily for reference, although an application may be made to the Education Department
of RIBA for a student membership, which allows up to 5 books to be borrowed from a limited lending
stock.

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The British Library
96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB tel.: 7412 7677
All M.A. students must register as readers at the British Library. An application form may be obtained
from the Reader Admission Office. In order to obtain authorisation, students should submit this form to
the AA Graduate Office.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science

London School of Economics
Portugal Street, WC2 tel.: 7955 7229

Development Planning Unit

9 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1 tel.: 7388 7581 - Students need a letter of introduction from the
AA. The library is being restructured and is open on a limited basis. Phone for details.

RIBA Drawings Collection

21 Portman Square, London W1 tel.: 7580 5533 ex 4804
An extensive collection of architectural drawings, a catalogue of which is available in the AA Library.
By appointment. Phone a day or two before.

Royal Academy
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1 tel.: 7300 8000
The collection includes work by Royal Academicians dating from the Academy’s founding in 1786,
including paintings, architectural drawings and sketches, and portraits.
Open 2pm-5pm Monday-Friday or by appointment during the morning. Advance notice of your interest is helpful.

The Sir John Soane Museum

13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2 tel.: 7430 0175
John Soane’s House and collection, a catalogue of which is available in the AA Library.

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, WC18
Students need a letter from the AA, and must pay an annual fee and refundable deposit.

University of London Library

Senate House, Malet Street, WC1 tel.: 7636 4514
A letter from the AA is required to apply for a reader’s ticket, which is for reference only.

Victoria and Albert Museum Library

The National Art Library, South Kensington, London SW7 tel.: 7589 6371
Available for occasional reference, but regular readers must apply for a ticket.

Warburg Institute
University of London, Woburn Square, London WC1 tel.:7580 9663
A letter of introduction from the AA Graduate School office is required in order to obtain a reader’s
ticket.

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5. Teaching and Learning Strategies

The courses in Terms 1 and 2 are designed to equip students with the essential knowledge and
analytical and critical tools they will need when they embark upon the dissertation in Terms 3 and 4.
They consist of lectures and seminars where students are required to make individual presentations
and engage in discussion upon preliminary reading and writing exercises. On the basis of previous
experience, we have learned that these courses must make definite and individual demands of the
students and this is reflected in the teaching practice, the tasks required, and the assessment
procedures. As a minimum, students are expected to cover the required reading given by the course
outlines. Each presentation and written work must relate to the course topic and the scope must be
agreed with the course tutor.

Towards the end of Term 2, students will be nearing the point when all the course materials will have
been presented to them, and this will be the appropriate moment for them to begin to discuss--both in
seminars and individual tutorials--a possible range of issues, from which they might choose to
formulate their thesis topic. Every effort is made to respond to the individual student’s interest. But it
is also the task of tutors to help the student transform her/his topic into a project that falls within the
broad objectives of the course. On occasion, this will result in a student having to change her or his
mind about the topic of the thesis, but as long as adequate time is left to deal with this possibility, this
experience of finding a topic which can successfully be treated in a recognisably architectural fashion,
rather than according to the discourse of some other discipline, can be itself valuable for the student.

The progress of the students over the year will be formally monitored through the assessment of their
presentations and written work, as described in the section on assessment. Students will have regular
tutorials with tutors and the director of the programme. One permanent item on the agenda of tutorial
is the discussion of the student perception of the course and the student perception of her/his own
progress. This is also an issue where the informal and community character of the AA as a whole, and
the expectation of participation in events throughout the school, inevitably produces a strong sense of
how a student is adapting to the MA as a whole. In addition to this informal but invaluable
background, student feedback is formally sought at the end of each term. Many of the changes in the
structure, content and organisation of the course have been adopted as a response to student’s
requests and critical reflections.

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6. Assessment

Master’s students are continuously assessed on the basis of presentations, written submissions and the
final dissertation. All assessments are individual. It should be underlined that the course requires
attendance at lectures, seminars and other events offered by the programme. Non-attendance at
courses is dealt initially by requiring an explanation from the student and any sign of systematic
absenteeism is referred to the Director of the Programme. Absence for reasons of illness, family crisis
etc. must be communicated to the Graduate Office.

Written submissions and the composition of the dissertation are not only assessed in the manner
described below, but are monitored pedagogically in tutorials with the teaching staff and through the
teacher’s review and peer review in class presentations. Following any assessment, students will be
given written feedback, which considers the qualities mentioned below (see assessment criteria) in
relation to the learning objectives of the individual courses, and verbal advice. Borderline students may
be advised to resubmit the work requirement and given specific advice as to how to improve the work.

All written submissions are double marked, primarily by the course’s tutor and a member of the
programme’s teaching staff. The programme’s External Examiner whose role includes insuring fair
marking and the maintenance of appropriate academic standards also reviews student assessment. In
the case of the dissertation, the External Examiner reviews a representative sample of dissertations
(for example - 2 from the high range, 2 from the middle, 2 from the low) that have been submitted by
students in the year they are examined as well as any resubmitted dissertations. The External Examiner
also reviews a representative sample of written submissions, together with their marks and assessment
reports.

The External Examiner will be given adequate time (at least three weeks) in which to review the
material before the meeting of the programme’s final examination board. That board is composed of
the External Examiner and regular members of the teaching staff, assisted by the Graduate School’s
administrative co-ordinator. To the board falls the responsibility for the validation of the marks of
submitted work and of the dissertation. It decides upon how to recommend pass, failure or distinction
for each student. The board and its External Examiner report its decisions to the AA Academic
Board. This in turn reports to The Open University. Notification of results is transmitted to students
by the Registrar’s Office acting through the Graduate School co-ordinator.

Assessment criteria:

 Understanding of the historical and theoretical context of the issues addressed

 A sound analytical and critical grasp of the main ideas, concepts and terms employed or discussed
 Ability to understand specific spatial and visual practices in relation to a broader cultural and
trans-disciplinary field
 Good judgment in the selection of ideas and references and ability to shape a clear direction of
research and thought through a large field of inquiry
 The application of critical faculties and the capacity to represent the views of various authors
 Evidence of a clear understanding in the formulation and analysis of the problem addressed by
the written submission
 A recognition of the history of the problem and its implications and effects as raised by the topic
of the study
 The construction of a clear argument which establishes and develops the students point of view in
respect to the problem

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 An attempt to bring a critical and innovative perspective to the problem at hand
 Effective and appropriate use of visual and graphic material in the construction and expression of
the main argument
 A capacity to apply knowledge gained within the context of the MA to the issue in question
 Clear structure, writing and presentation of coursework
 An appropriate acknowledgement and referencing of sources of information

The marking of course work is on a scale of 0-100% with a pass mark of 50% and grading as shown
below:

Mark Grade Performance

70% or + A Excellent Pass

65–69% B+ High Pass

60–64% B Good Pass

57–59% C+ Satisfactory Pass

54–56% C Adequate Pass

50–53% D Low Pass

D 49% or - F Fail

The marks given by each of the two internal assessors are averaged to give the overall mark for each
course submission. Where the result of the assessment calculation creates a mark of 0.5% or greater,
this will be rounded up to the next full percentage point. Where the calculation creates a mark below
0.5% this will be rounded down to the next full percentage point. A course work average mark is then
calculated based on the credit rating of each submitted item relating to the assessed tasks of Terms 1
and 2.

Two internal assessors mark the dissertation also separately. To qualify for the MA, students must
reach the 50% threshold on both the course work average, and on the dissertation average mark. An
overall final mark is then calculated as the weighted average of course work and dissertation. Any large
difference (of 10 or more points) in the marking of the two assessors is raised for discussion at the
Examination Board meeting.

Marks are important in the following way:

 The MA degree is awarded a distinction when the overall final mark is 70% or higher. Other
grading is registered in the Graduate School’s database and is available on transcripts but do not
appear on certificates.
 Students who fail to attain a pass mark on one or more items of course work will be asked to
resubmit (only once) and pass before being allowed to proceed with their final project. All
resubmissions are capped at 50%. Guidance from programme staff during the preparation of any
resubmission is available.

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 Failure to submit an item of course work is not admissible even if the combined mark of the
remaining items were to exceed 50%.
 In cases where there are no accepted mitigating circumstances and where coursework is submitted
late, marks will be deduced. Any element of assessed work submitted up to seven days after the
deadline will be marked and 10 marks (on a scale of 100) will be deducted for that element, for
each calendar day of lateness incurred. Any piece of work submitted 7 or more days after the
deadline will not be assessed and assigned a mark of 0, unless the student submits personal
circumstances and these are accepted by the Director of the programme.
 Students who have passed their course work but fail to attain an average of 50% for their
dissertation will normally be given a limited period of time in which to submit a revised
dissertation. This will be assessed by two assessors and reviewed by the External Examiner and
Examination Board of the immediately following academic year. Resubmission is allowed once
only. Resubmitted dissertations are assessed with no limit on the marking. Resubmission assessed
as ‘Fail’ by the Examination board will lead to disqualification from the degree.

Final assessment of students’ work is made by a Board of Examiners, which includes the Programme
Staff and an approved External Examiner. The Programme proposes the External Examiner first to
the Academic Board for confirmation, and then, final approval is sought from The Open University in
accordance with their procedures. The External Examiner is briefed by the Programme Staff in
advance, and sent copies of the Programme Brief, together with the Aims of the Programme and the
intended learning outcomes of Seminars and Lecture Series. The External Examiner is often present at
the Final Presentation of the thesis. Following the meeting of the Examining Board, the External
Examiner is required to submit a Written Report in accordance with The Open University procedures.
When all the above procedures have been satisfactorily undertaken, The Open University will be
requested to issue the awards.

Plagiarism and student substitution in the preparation of coursework are practices considered very
serious and unacceptable at the AA School and can lead to failure and removal from the School (see
AA Regulations document on Plagiarism). Plagiarism is defined as stealing another person's work and
ideas and using them as though they were your own. It is also plagiarism if you do not acknowledge
the co-operation of another person who works with you or who gives you permission to use their
work. Student substitution is defined as getting someone else to do your work. If the School suspects
that one of these practices has taken place, it reserves the right of using appropriate software to detect
them.

For further information on assessment, progression and award credits please consult the Graduate
School Academic Organisation and Regulations document.

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7. Resources

Students have access to all of the AA school’s facilities. Introductions are given at the beginning of the
year. This is an arena where, in order to understand what is offered to students on the MA
programme, one has to view the school as a whole. The major limitation on what is offered to
students is the limitation imposed by their timetable and their need to concentrate on their own work.
Time permitting, a number of the School’s activities are open to them – lectures, workshops,
performances, juries, public discussions, etc. We actively encourage students to join fully in the life of
the community, balancing this only with their need to plan and timetable their own work. But this
dimension of the life of the student is very important and part of their experience of the year.

Libraries: All new AA students are introduced to the School’s Main Library on AA Introduction
week. In terms of library resources for their coursework, the AA library holds the material indicated in
course bibliographies in a special reserved section of the library shelving. Library staff ensures that
items in the Programme’s reading lists are available in the library and can be viewed on the library’s
web site pages at www.aaschool.ac.uk/library. The library also stores reference copies of earlier MA,
MPhil and PhD dissertations. In addition to the books carried on open shelving and available on loan,
the library holds a full range of architectural periodicals and magazines as well as a range of reference
books. Students can make on-line searches of catalogues of other institutions.

The AA has the inestimable advantage of being within walking distance of the British Library. All MA
students are required to register at the British Library. It becomes of particular value when our
students begin their research for their thesis. The library at RIBA is itself within walking distance, and
taken together with its print collection constitutes a major resource, as do the print departments of the
British Museum and the resources offered by the London Museum. It is possible, for a small fee, for
students to become full borrowing members, of Senate House Library and the private subscription
library, the London Library. Students, depending upon the areas they are specialising in, have been
much helped by the libraries of SOAS and of the Warburg Institute.

Computing: The AA Computer Department offers introduction, assistance and access to machines.
Students will be provided with an e-mail account and access to the Internet. Facilities for scanning and
printing are also available.

Photo Library and Digital Photo Studio: The AA possesses a unique and very extensive photo
collection, which students not only can, but also must be encouraged to use. It sets the way in which
students learn to make productive use of architectural images in the presentation of their work. In
addition students are able to make full use of the photographic studio. These two facilities combined
with the computing facilities have and will continue to rapidly transform the student relation to images
in their own presentations and in their thesis.

Workspace: For seminars, meetings, group tutorials or group work, we use the room which is
assigned to the HCT programme. For the HCT Debates or other events open to the School
Community, a room will be booked according to the needs.

AA Workshop: The School has excellent in house workshop facilities for wood and metal
constructions, a model workshop and the digital prototyping lab. The large residential workshops at
Hooke Park in Dorset offer additional opportunities to produce experimental structures. Students
wishing to use the AA workshops must follow a detailed introductory training session on the first
week of the academic year.

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